Eckhart ran into some trouble when the authorities began looking into what he was saying as opposed to how he was saying it. They were especially concerned with its potential effect on the unlearned, who might not know the difference. In the parlance of cosmotheandrism, he was very much speaking to and from the RH. Reduced to LH propositions, there was bound to be misunderstanding, analogous to the difference between dream logic and wideawake consciousness.
Note that it is rare to know a dream from within the dream (AKA lucid dreaming). Rather, we only know of dreams a posteriori, when we consciously recall them. Whenever we think about a dream, the thinking actually takes place in a dialectical space between two different modes of thought. One might say that this space is a “third” between the first two (i.e., between RH and LH). Here it is the betweenness that counts: this space is the cosmotheandric how between the two whats.
Note that the Anthropos is always the link between two whats, whether it is between other persons, between mind and Cosmos, or between Anthropos and Theos. What is the nature of this ambiguous space between whats? Whatever it is, it is not just another what. So what is it?
It is impossible to describe without falling into — or ascending upto — paradox, which is not a bug, rather, a feature. Our how is not pre-literacy, nor is it literacy, rather post-literacy; or rather, literacy working over pre-literate material and arriving at something new.
Which actually goes to the existence of newness and novelty per se, because this is how creativity works. The RH ground is always the silent partner in any creative endeavor. Likewise, psychotherapy (my kind) is always a conversation not only involving this third partner, but its point is to enlist this partner as a way of being-in-the-world more generally. It mirrors the trialogue at the edge of the subjective horizon that is always taking place, bringing this flowing con-versation out into the open. For the Third is always there anyway, speaking in various tongues such as somatization, acting out, interpersonal conflict, self-defeating behavior, ideology, etc. In a word, symptoms.
In the book Paradox at Play: Metaphor in Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, Johnson describes it thus: our mysterious maestro
insists that the ground of conceptual thought is not itself conceptual, meaning that our attempts to answer fundamental philosophical questions have not been frustrated because we lack the appropriate conceptual apparatus, but because the questions themselves point to the nonconceptual ground of thinking that makes conceptual thought possible.
In exploring this dynamic — one might say Living — ground,
Metaphors allow us to enter more deeply into a thinker’s imaginative horizon than concepts do because they operate on an aesthetic, preconscious level that springs from the most fundamental metaphysical building blocks of the way we see ourselves and the world.
Show me the metaphor and I’ll show you the man.
Agreed, but the cosmotheandric man takes it one step further and asks: what is a good metaphor for metaphor, or for metaphor as such — a meta-metaphor? We cannot think without metaphor, but what is thinking metaphorically like? Is there a nonconcepual Master Metaphor that is like everything because it is prior to everything?
For Eckhart the master metaphor is the Ground, which is not “like” truth, rather, the prior nonconceptual truth itself. This Ground is like a bubbling spring that boils over into everything; or rather, everything is a consequence of this endless boiling over. To dwell in this Ground is not so much to “live without a why,” rather, to live within the space between the Why and Because. This is the reason why no Because ever exhausts the Why — at least in principle. History is, of course, an endless series of Whys that pretend to enclose us in a Because, from scientism to religionism. The Authorities, whoever they are, always pretend to know the Because.
Because they said so.
Correct. Recall Wittgenstein’s crack that “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” But really the bewitchment is a function of literacy itself, insofar as it encloses us within language, unless language remains open to the poles of immanence and transcendence. Properly functioning language is the liberating tool that links us to these two “grounds,” but in reality there is only the one dynamic Ground in two modes.
∞
With these preluminary murmurandoms out of the way, let’s get down to cases, for example, Berdyaev, because he struggles with the meaning of religion in a most modern — and cosmotheandric — way:
The eternal man, oriented toward eternity and infinity, is at once the eternally new man and an eternal and limitless purpose. The eternal man is not something given once for all: he is not to be comprehended statically. The truly new man is a realization of the eternal man, bearing in himself the image and likeness of God.
So, it’s a process. In Orthodox Christianity our theomorphism is a given, except to say that the image is one thing, the likeness another: the meaning of life is for the potential of the image to be actualized in the likeness. Thus, “The new man must be creative, and hence he must look toward the future, toward that which has never been. This is the answer to the call of God,” God being none other than the Great Attractor that draws the image toward the likeness. Even so, “Man is a riddle in this world, perhaps the supreme riddle.”
I would go further, and say: no man, no riddle — that man and riddle co-arise. Again, there were no riddles or questions of any kind until we showed up and began asking What the flip?
Riddle, riddled, and riddler rolled into one?
Man simultaneously embodies both riddle and solution, question and answer, why and because. But we can in no way be the answer to the riddle that we are. Rather, any answer must result from a dynamic engagement with the Transcendent Real, so to speak, which is again the very function of a functioning religion.
For Berdyaev, “Man may know himself from above or from below, from his own light, from the divine element in him, and he may know himself from his darkness..., from the demonic element within himself.” And
he may do this because he is a dual and a contradictory being, a being polarized to the highest degree, god-like and beast-like, high and low, free and slave, capable of rising to the heights or of falling, capable of great love and sacrifice or of great cruelty and limitless egotism.
We rate this passage 100% nihil bobstat, or free of philosophical BS. Rather, Berdyev tells it like it is (or us like we are): we are always polarized within the tension of immanence and transcendence.
But how did we get into this existential pickle? And what does it all mean?
Let’s say there is a no-man’s land between meaning and meaninglessness. Except to say that this is every man’s land — not to mention a knowing man’s land — in that this is the dynamic space in which all men live and know: “Man is the point where two worlds intersect, he belongs to two orders. Here lies the infinite complexity and difficulty of human life. There is the spiritual man and the natural man, and one man is both” (ibid.).
One person and two natures?
That rings a bell... But in any event, “the existence of personality presupposes the existence of God,” and “If God does not exist, as the source of super-personality values, then personality is valueless.”
In short, No meaning for you! Even so, the meaning is not given in the manner of an unambiguous concept or proposition, nor is this meaning transferable, i.e., my neighbor’s meaning isn’t my meaning. Rather, Petey was on to something with his crack about The religion the Almighty and me works out betwixt us, because the Great Betwixt is precisely where the meaning arises.
Which raises a host of potential problems, depending on the number of human beings at any given time. Let’s call it The Anthropic Incompleteness Principle: human beings are necessarily incomplete but ordered to our own completeness, which can only be found “in God” — or in O, if you like. In short, no God, no possibility of completeness.
And even then, what are the chances of our finding any straight-up meaning given the twisted wreckage of mankind? Schuon speaks of four inevitable infirmities to which man is heir. To begin at the top, it should go without saying that we are “creature, not Creator,” which is to say, “manifestation and not Principle or Being.” Or, just say we are contingent and not necessary or absolute.
Can’t argue with that.
Second, we are human beings and all this implies, situated somewhere between absolute and relative, God and animal — somewhat like a terrestrial angel or a celestial ape. So we are human, and you can’t get worse than that, at least potentially, since we run the gamut from Mary Magdalene, first witness to the Resurrection, to Magda Goebbels, first lady of the Third Reich.
Third, we are all different, which is to say, individuals, and there can be no science of the utterly unique and unrepeatable.
Lastly, there are human differences that are indeed contingent and not essential or providential. These include negative things such as neurotic conflicts and mind parasites that result from the exigencies of childhood, but also the accidental aspects of genetics, temperament, culture, language, and history. In order to exist at all, we must surely exist in a specific form and a particular time and place.
Our earthly experiences are woven with contingency and chance, but it is difficult to imagine who we would concretely be in the absence of these contingencies. Given different experiences, we would be very different versions of ourselves — for example, if we had had different parents. I can think of a great number of people without whom I can’t imagine who I’d be, which goes again to the principles of both contingency and intersubjectivity.
Can there be a one size fits all cure for these infirmities — for the existential maladies of the finite, human, individual, and contingent? No, it seems that each of us is a unique problem of God, and doesn’t a unique problem require a unique treatment tailored to the individual person? But what even is a person?
Berdyaev is raising his hand again. I think he has impulse control issues.
Yes, Nick? Is there something you’d like to share with the group?
A person is never a completed datum: it is the task, the ideal, of man. The ideal of man is a perfect unity, the integrity of personality.
So, we’re always on the way to who we already are?
“No man can say he is fully a person,” because “The personality must produce itself, enrich itself, fill itself with universal content, attain unity in integrity, throughout the whole extent of its life.”
Berdyaev is essentially saying that personality is indeed a “joint effort” worked out — not determined — betwixt man and God, who is the very principle of creativity in whom we uniquely participate, making us “co-creators” of both the Cosmos and Anthropos, both of which are necessarily “works in progress.” Thus, “The essence of life is this striving of all being toward eternity.”
This almost sounds like it makes us “co-creators” of God, at least in some sense?
Shh! Don’t scare off the remaining reader(s).
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