So: any denial of God presupposes a godlike ability to pronounce on the godless nature of reality. Which in the end is just the same old immanence overplaying its hand and denying transcendence even while indulging in it — or thoughts denying the very thinker who is always situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence.
Go on.
I’m thinkin’...
‘Bout what?
About this troublesome business of fallenness and the thorny problem of evil and suffering. For cosmotheandrism the traditional explanations just don’t cut it, hence, one of the appeals of Schuon’s approach: “If the world is the world, this is because it is not God; unable to be either Absoluteness or Infinity, it is relative and finite — hence the presence of evil…”
So, it’s nobody’s fault. Or, it’s everybody’s fault, to the extent that everybody I know is finite and relative. Hence, “If there is a cosmos, a universal manifestation, there must also be a fall or falls, for to say ‘manifestation’ is to say ‘other than God’ and remotion” (ibid.).
It seems that the whole Garden of Eden thing is intended to convey this ineveateapple metaphysical truth. Which makes sense, for if the creation is a kind of radiation of, or projection from, God, “to say radiation is to say distance, hence alienation or impoverishment: the solar rays dim and become lost in the night of space. From this arises, at the end of the projection, the paradoxical phenomenon of evi” (ibid.).
Looked at from a different angle, Schuon writes that
Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility — and necessity — of evil.
Thus
The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence.
The point is that God can still have a plan — this being in the order of a final cause, not an efficient one — but he has given man the power to mess up the plan. Sayeth Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face. This being the case, then history is one endless roundhouse punch to the face of God.
I don’t mean to interrupt your wayward vertical meandering, but the subject was atheists and how they get that way. The question before the Cosmos is, Is atheism even possible?
Of course it is possible, otherwise there would be no atheists, the question being whether it is rational or ordered to truth. It is certainly rational in the narrow sense of rendering conclusions from its own premises, but again, there is no logical operation that can furnish its own premises, so atheism, just like theism, implicitly supposes an ability on man’s part to exit the circle of reason and to freely choose one’s premises. Thus, it should not surprise us in the least that a person who begins with scientistic or materialistic assumptions has predetermined his conclusions.
This is not what we are doing here. Rather, we are not making any presuppositions about God, rather, beginning with the same world as the atheist and seeing where it leads or what it implies — what it means. Which leads directly to our next subject:
Modern Man’s Relentless Search for Meaninglessness
The first question is whether there could be meaninglessness in the absence of meaning. For isn’t this analogous to having chaos with no order, relative with no Absolute, falsehood with no truth, appearances with no reality, or shadows with no light? In each case, the former term is parasitic on the latter.
Nevertheless, some people not only insist that life has no intrinsic meaning but derive meaning from being just this kind of person — the kind of stunningly brave fellow who can stare into the abyss staring right back at him and conclude that life is a mutual reflection of nobody and nothing.
Although an intrinsically meaningless Cosmos could never account for meaning, the converse is not true: the existence of meaning necessarily entails the possibility of meaninglessness.
Certainly one of the problems with finding meaning is the affluence that is a relatively new phenomenon, even in the modern West. After all, if you’re thirsty and hungry, the meaning of life is pretty simple: finding suitable refreshments and grabbing a bite. Prior to modernity, the principal occupation of the great majority of mankind was the production of food. So, life essentially meant agriculture. I’m only one generation away from this, in that my father grew up on a small farm in the south of England.
It has only been a hundred years or so since the majority of Americans became urban dwellers. According to historian David Kennedy, over half the states and nearly half of American citizens “still counted as rural in 1930,” with a way of life that “moved between birth and death to the ancient rhythms of sun and season,” which is to say more cyclical than linear.
And for these people, dark meant dark, for few rural dwellers had electricity, thus the difficult choice of either sitting in the dark and not knowing what was crawling on you, or firing up the lantern or candle and attracting even more mosquitoes and other pests.
And of course, city life was no bargain either. Although industrial workers earned more than farmers, “Not until 1923 did United States Steel Corporation grudgingly abandon the twelve-hour day,” nor had the two-day weekend yet been discovered by the early explorers of Slack.
Perhaps Marx was right about one thing — about how mechanized factory work robbed labor of any intrinsic meaning.
There is also the fact that meaning existed more in the collective than the individual for most of man’s history. In his outstanding Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Siedentop writes of how individualism and unique identity didn’t happen overnight but were the work of centuries. Explaining how this evolved would require a book of its own, which I don’t need to write, since Siedentop has already written it. The end result is that we are now called upon to discover life’s meaning on our own, and that’s a big responsibility.
Above we alluded to Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, the thesis of which being that a primary motivational force in human beings is precisely this search for meaning. It was here just a few centuries ago. Where did it go? Having been a concentration camp survivor, he believed that the worst forms of suffering could be endured if the individual could preserve some sense of meaning. In this regard, he claims that nihilists were less equipped to endure the unendurable, quoting Nietzsche to the effect that He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. Which is ironic coming from a guy who declared that the ultimate source of meaning was deceased.
In any event, it seems that affluence both giveth and taketh away. In other words, while it opens a space for potential meaning, it cannot provide that meaning. Rather, finding meaning is now a kind of lifelong existential do-it-yourself project. This I know because every working psychotherapist knows it. In the modern world the search for meaning is a retail industry, in contrast to premodern times, when meaning was more of a wholesale product provided by religion.
Social psychologist Rob Henderson discusses how the existence of even relatively meaningless work still provides a great deal of meaning for most people, so think twice before retiring unless you have something more meaningful with which to fill your time, such as using all your skills to search for the Cosmic Area Rug. Henderson writes that “people are more likely to experience ‘flow’ at work than during leisure,” which “is the state of full focus on a task; you lose track of time. When in a flow state, the challenge in front of you matches your abilities such that you feel both effective and competent.” And “people reported feeling flow far more often at work than in leisure.”
So, “Be careful what you wish for,” because “those who lose their jobs are more likely to kill themselves compared with those who had not lost their jobs.” Not every dude is cut out to simply abide: “Free time sounds appealing, but it has no built-in structure,” so “most people let time pass them by rather than use it to cultivate their skills, talents, or interests.” In the West, we actually have more free time — more slack — than ever, but instead of using it “to learn new skills or build something meaningful,” it is mostly spent watching TV or scrolling.
Free peoples’ asses, and their minds don’t follow?
I’m afraid not. There is the Maslowian notion that “once basic material needs are met, people will use their free time to seek meaning and fulfillment. Unshackled from the burden of work, they will thrive.” Some people of course do thrive, but not most. Rather, “they do not spend their days painting or sculpting or learning another language,” let alone searching for the Cosmic Area Rug, but just playing video games, or worse, becoming mischievous political activists to make up for the absence of meaning. Thus “A society that removes the need to work risks removing one of the main sources of meaning in life.”
As recently as a century ago our Big Box religions still provided a kind of ready-made, prefabricated, off-the-shelf meaning for our lives. But who can deny that this prefab meaning no longer speaks to mostuvus?
Well, for Schuon, the general purpose of religion as such is to facilitate “discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent, and the essential function of the will is attachment to the Permanent or to the Real. This discernment and this attachment are the quintessence of all spirituality.”
This goes back to the boat and the shore, the purpose of the former being to reach the latter. It can be a magnificent yacht or a humble dinghy, so long as it gets you to the other side. For Schuon, what he calls the perennial religion “is fundamentally this,” that
the Real entered into the illusory so that the illusory might be able to return into the Real. It is this mystery, together with the metaphysical discernment and contemplative concentration that are its complement, which alone is important in an absolute sense from the point of view of gnosis.
So, to the extent that a religion “works,” this is the principle of why it works. Put another way, this is its meaning and purpose:
First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral. Secondly: religion is union. It is union with God, the Great Spirit. Everything in religion has its foundation in one of these two elements: in discernment or in union.
So really it comes down to full participation in the participatory reality of cosmotheandrism, or of the anthropic individual realizing the dynamic tri-viduality between man, world, and God. Nor are we the first to arrive at this theoria, which is to say, vision. For example, there is Meister Eckhart, whose rhetoric focuses on the then new conception of the individual as something significant and apart from our immersion in the mythos of the collective:
Though it is not often given enough attention when telling the story of Western intellectual history, we can explain why many philosophical and intellectual movements arose when they did if we look at changes in our conception of what an individual is in relation to other individuals, to nature, and to the divine (Clint Johnson, emphasis mine.)
In other words, the dynamic and irreducible relations between the anthropic subject, other subjects (intersubjectivity), Cosmos, and Theos.
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