Theism: What’s in it for Me?

It is easy enough to prove the existence of God—

Objection!

I said prove, not believe. The former is a matter of logic or experience, the latter one of commitment. The first is a dry conclusion, the second a fluid marriage. One might say that faith seeks understanding as much as understanding seeks faith, because knowing of God isn’t the same as knowing God.

It is also a matter of sensibility, for many of our contemporary sophisticates believe religion is in poor taste, others that atheism is, and de gustibus. Everyone is attracted to different things, nor can we will what spontaneously attracts or repels us. On the other hand, you’ve probably had the experience of initially not liking something — say, a musical artist or genre — and eventually learning to appreciate it. So in that sense, sometimes we can will what we learn to enjoy. This is especially true if someone we respect tells us that the the payoff is worth the effort.

Nevertheless, even supposing we believe in God, does God believe in us? Or, in the words of Dávila, What is difficult is not to believe in God, but to believe we are important to Him.

Eckhart had some wildly non-inappropriate things to say about this, for example, that

It would be a small thing to me that “the Word was made flesh” for man in Christ as a person distinct from me unless he was also made flesh in me personally so that I too might be the Son of God.

In other words, woo hoo for God, but what’s in it for the restavus? Speaking frankly,

What does it help me if this birth is always happening and yet it does not happen in me? All that matters is that it happens in me.

Christianity is a quintessential expression of cosmotheandrism, in that it quite clearly promulgates the view that in the Incarnation, Cosmos, Theos, and Anthropos are officially entangled: “The idea of the Incarnation and the idea that man is created in the image of God are only feasible if the scope of the individual and the divine are not wholly exclusive” (Johnson). In the ancient world such an entanglement was more or less unthinkable. For example, for neoplatonism it was possible to ascend to God, but only by losing one’s individuality.

Cashing in your chimps.

Correct. One can experience God but one cannot be there to experience it, much as how one can only provide an after-action account of last night’s dream from outside the dream. The Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream is not the one who only remembers it.

But with the Incarnation it is as if the Dreamer becomes the dream, or rather, the author of history — which, let’s face it, is already the weirdest dream ever — takes part in it. The question is, does this render the dream even crazier, or wake us from the dream?

As to whether God believes in man, the question answers itself, because the Incarnation implies God’s faith that human nature can benefit from the exercise. Which goes back to Eckhart’s question: what is the point of the Incarnation if it does not happen in me? All that matters is that it happens in me!

∞

Now, more generally cosmotheandrism most certainly believes in a Theos who believes in us. After all, it’s only fair. It’s called reciprocity, the point being that God and man are complementary, or two poles of a single relation. Of course, in all complementarities one is more primordial, in this case God. But God is the very Principle of both personhood and relation. This Principle is itself substance-in-relation, meaning that an irreducible Otherness is woven into the very substance of the Godhead, and for this reason reflected herebelow. Specifically, it is woven into us, in that we too are intersubjective persons, i.e., members of one another.

Speaking of Eckhart, he attempted his own version of cosmotheandrism he called the Opus Tripartitum. It was never finished, but only because cosmotheandrism can never be finished. His opus was intended to be a grand synthesis of being, truth, and unity — or existence, intellect, and ground, all mutually interpenetrating and ultimately the One Thing that is always happening, whether in God or in us.

Eckhart also wrote something he called Paradisus Animae Intelligentis which, in the parlance of the times, means The Paradise of the Intelligent Soul. The intellect is the nous, which for Eckhart is our uncreated spark in the dark, where the vestigial pilot light of human consciousness touches and mirrors the divine Light without separation. We could say that the Spirit is the wind that stirs the spark into a flame, but that is a somewhat different rant.

In any event, Eckhart’s paradise is not a distant spatial location, rather, an interior state of dynamic and unconditioned presence. It is where God’s birth takes place in the ground of the soul — where the created and uncreated overlap entirely. Conversely, if God were literally single he could by no means be free to mingle with anything but himself.

A confirmed old bachelor?

Correct: an ordinary God who likes to live his life free of strife, doing whatever he thinks is best for him.

But let an Other in your life and your sabbatical is through!

Not necessarily, for in cosmotheandrism Being and Intellect constitute a harmonious identity-in-difference mirroring the same one in divinas, i.e., between Father-Ground and Son-Logos. In short, God and the soul share one single act of being. Eckhart’s “paradise" is the realization that Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos are not three separate entities but a single interpenetrating reality unfolding now and in every now, since this dynamic now is all there ever is.

Shifting seers for a moment, here is a surprising aphorism that goes directly to our final Axiom: That which is not a person is not finally anything. As it so happens, Eckhart was writing at a time when increasing attention was being paid to the nature and significance of the Anthropic individual, i.e., the self. What we take for granted was then just coming into view. One might say that he was witness to an expanding homoverse, for which reason “it became increasingly possible to speak of the individual as being divine” and therefore also “possible to speak of the divine as being individual.” Prior to this, Eckhart’s approach would have been regarded as a hubristic attempt “to usurp abilities that properly belong to the divine realm of the eternal. From that standpoint, an individual cannot be temporal and eternal” (Johnson):

In traditional societies, the individual is not at all a place of privilege. What is individual is transitory, part of the world of change. In a cyclical conception of time, individual life has meaning insofar as it reenacts or participates in what is archetypal and beyond the profane world of change…. Insofar as an individual participates in what is archetypal, he or she ceases to individual. By this way of thinking, how could one be both universal and individual?

I can’t worry about that. Eternal life goes on, man.

Yes, except to say that it goes on here and now. Which is what we call human privilege. It’s not fair to lesser species — even to hypothetical angels who are stuck where they are in the cosmic scheme. Rather, man alone spans the whole existentialada — which, of course, is one way of conceptualizing the Incarnation, for

Clearly, if individuals remain in the divine, are reflections of it, and seek to return to it, little distance must be crossed to say that an individual can be both man and God.

This little distance goes to Eckhart’s Impertinent Question of “what’s in it for me?” For it goes to “the paradox of being both created as creatures and uncreated as God, and the way that God is wholly present in each individual while He is also beyond being.” The Incarnation represents the place where “mankind straddles the divide between the creaturely and divine,” and we are always in this place.

So the Incarnation just rubs it in?

In a sense yes, because it is the full actualization of what is always there in potential: God becomes man that man might become God.