A Childlike Symphony to God

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.

Lives Are at Stake!

Let us begin this episode with an aphorism: Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. For us this vision of the world is cosmotheandrism, since it makes religion not only rationally defensible but even a necessary entailment.

Dávila goes on to say that We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible. Therefore, one task of the cosmotheandric vision is to make our God-talk intelligible and plausible — again, to render belief believable. It only becomes unbelievable to the extent that our interlocutors have confined themselves to an implausible and outmoded metaphysic, both scientifically and philosophically. Thus, it is not that belief in God is implausible, rather, an implausible and probably unexamined philosophy that effectively soils the Cosmic Area Rug. We see only what our metaphysic permits us to see, or rather, we pretend not to see those things that are outside or unexplained by it.

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Any metaphysic — whether implicit or explicit — assumes or posits necessary and universal truths that characterize all of reality. Science, for example can never prove that the Cosmos is a contingent and yet ordered totality intelligible to the intellect, rather, assumes it.

Metaphysics used to be the ultimate aim of philosophy, but in the modern and postmodern worlds it has generally been rejected as impossible in principle. Religion, of course, either assumes or expresses certain metaphysical claims, which necessarily make no sense in a scientistic metaphysic. Therefore, what is needed is a wider and deeper metaphysic that fully respects and takes on board the scientific insights of modernity. Otherwise, religion and secularism are simply talking past one another, for supposing we do not share the same first principles, then arguing about their entailments and details is just an annoying way to kill time.

But if a scientific claim is true, and a religious claim is true, neither can stand alone, rather, must be measured against a standard that is independent of the claim. In science the independent standard is simply the material world against which we test our models and theories. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or elegant the theory: if nature’s feedback says no, then the theory is wrong. For both science and theology, reality is the final court of appeal.

But what is the objective standard against which religion may be assessed, and by what sort of feedback? Here a problem arises, in particular, with regard to top-down revelation, which believers will say is “self-authenticating” since it issues straight from the source’s mouth. However, this argument is entirely circular, since it assumes what needs to be proven — that the revelation has come from God. Of course, there is always the testimony of tradition, which speaks with a chorus of millions. However, in order to prove a theory wrong, it takes only one instance. Truth is not a democracy, rather, more of a benign dictatorship.

∞

As previously discussed in Book I, Einstein was all over the orthoparadoxical combination of an endless intelligibility of the Cosmos converging on an unfathomable supra-intelligent horizon we can never actually reach. For example, he spoke of “the humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man.” Thus, like a mirage on a desert highway, we can asymptotically approach this horizon while never actually reaching it, because it seems to recede as we move toward it. This isn’t because of its movement per se, but because of its Infinitude.

In other words, supposing one takes a thousand progressive steps toward the Infinite horizon, one is still an infinite distance away from it. It seems that no matter how much closer we are, we are no closer to the goal. “Into the sea all the rivers go,” writes Eckhart, “and yet the sea is never filled, and still to their goal the rivers go.” The basis of our epistemic striving cannot be dominance, containment, or closure, rather, wonder — which is to say, an endless openness to Being as such. Here again this is because the very principle of Being is Beyond Being, so Being is always more than we can say about it. Just as the Tao that can be spoken is not the real deal, it is equally true that the LH science that can be spoken is not the real RH science. Which is why the inspiraling riverrun between man and O is full of surprises! And I don’t use exclamation points except in an emergency.

How does all this add up to an emergency?

Because in the radically secular age in which we live, so-called educated people generally no longer understand the nature or purpose of religion, so somebody is in need of a damn good whacking for what our students are lacking.

“We have to reckon,” writes Torrance, “with the fact that all our human structures and institutions are now in a critical state, with serious problems that are to be traced back to the application to society of mechanistic analyses and explanations deriving from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” which is a quintessential case of left-brain bullying of the right. These “damaging splits in human life and culture” are the result of “alien and inappropriate patterns of behaviour imposed upon them.” So, not just an emergency, but a seriously damaging and even critical one. But perhaps you’ve never attended college, so you’re unaware of the alien and alienating indoctrination

So, it’s All About the Children as our politicians like to say?

Maybe you haven’t noticed that they leave college adrift in a Cosmos devoid of meaning and purpose, as if the whole world has gone crazy. For some three centuries now, “we have been passing through a period in which we have pursued human inquiry in a severely analytic [read: LH] manner, and on radically dualist foundations.” This has resulted in a fragmentation of “thought and culture,” and “in deep clefts in the heart of academic aims,” and thus “the serious collapse of cultural unity, not least between the sciences and the humanities” (Torrance). Ain’t no use jokin’: the humanities are broken.

C’mon. Nothing is effed here.

What the flip? Are you kidding? The anthropic plane has crashed into the scientistic mountain! With no vertical radar, civilization has entered a stupifying existential doom loop. How much more black could this be? The answer is none.

None more black? A little perspective please.

It’s not that material circumstances are bad, rather, the opposite. For in most ways we have to admit that things are getting better all the time, such that the average person living in the contemporary Western world enjoys a standard of living surpassing over 99% of the human beings who have ever lived. It has only been a little over 200 years since we freed ourselves from the Malthusian trap and began accumulating surplus wealth and enjoying its attendant slack. Once this occurred, economics was no longer a zero-sum game but one in which two plus two could add up to five bucks or more.

Nevertheless, some things never change, one of these being human desire, which is always infinite and can therefore never be fulfilled in this finite world. This was well understood by thinkers ranging from Guatama Buddha to Muddy Waters, the latter of whom could never be satisfied and just couldn’t keep from crying about it.

Victor Frankl, who survived a Nazi deathcamp — which can really put a crimp in your day — famously said that “A man can endure anything, except the lack of meaning.” Religion — the real ones, at any rate — once conveyed to man an implicit metaphysical vision that used to take care of this problem by situating us in a meaningful cosmic framework and giving us the time-tested ins and outs of the complicated case we call Life.

For example, in the Western tradition the Ten Commandments issued by the celestial league office provided the bylaws to let us know when we were playing by the rules or over the line. But imprisoned in subjectivism under the soft tyranny of relativism, anything goes. Say what you want, but in the absence of God the only honest alternative is nihilism — which is not healthy for the Anthropos, in the literal sense of barring us from an intuition of the wholeness of reality. Just look at the rates of mental illness, especially among the young. I don’t think “emergency” is overstating the case, nor a lazy use of exclamation points to liven the text. This is a mass casualty event, in the sense that The most customary form of suicide in our time consists in firing a bullet into the soul.

So I guess you could say that things are getting pretty serious right now.

Looking for Mister Big

Yesterday we completed Book II of our Cosmotheandric Trilogy, and if you missed it, you missed out on a damn good thing, the best thing that ever happened to the internet. Not only was it down to the nitty gritty, but you can tell all your friends in Rio Linda that the universe was definitely set on fire.

We now move on to Book III: Theos, but we have a problem. For unlike the first two volumes, it is not yet completed. Rather, I’m about two thirds of the way through. Despite having written 335 pages, I am still in the process of interviewing witnesses and gathering information. After all, we’re dealing with the biggest possible question, so this is obviously a very complicated case, with a lotta ins and outs—

Lotta strands in old Gagdad’s head?

Correct. I haven’t even glanced at the file for a couple months, but during that time have been dropping random nuggets into it, which need to be properly incorporated into the main text.

On the other hand, perhaps it will be amusing to watch someone attempt to accomplish this impossible task in real time. Will the author make it to the other side, or slip from the Lightrope into the abyss, as has befallen so many other vertical adventurers? How close can we fly to O without incinerating? Just how far may we babble into the tower of being before words fail altogether?

Can I even shake the dust off my keyboard and achieve the immodest task with which I have been charged?

I do have a collection of quotes at the beginning, which reflect the spirit of cosmotheandrism, for example,

You cannot shelter theology from science, or science from theology; nor can you shelter either of them from metaphysics, or metaphysics from either of them. There is no short cut to truth. —A.N. Whitehead

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. –Dávila

God entrusted man, created in his image and likeness, the mission of unifying the cosmos. —Pope Benedict XVI

The question of God and the question of myself are identical. —Rudolf Bultmann

No symbolization is adequate to the ineffability of the divine Beyond. Hence, when you are a believer on the level of symbol, you become an “infidel” to the ineffable truth of divine reality. —Eric Voegelin

Spinoza’s God is less than a person. Mine is more than a person, because God can’t be less than a person. He can play the role of a person. —Godel

One of the tasks of the book is to render belief itself believable, especially to the theodivergent among us — to vertical eccentrics, off-road spiritual adventurers, neuro-cosmologists, neo-traditional retro-futurists, etc. It is not so much the attempt to create a religion we can believe in, rather, to forge a vision of a world in which the existing religions are believable. The good ones, at any rate — those compatible with the cosmotheandric framework. It is not so much that there are many true religions, rather, many religions ordered to the one truth in more or less adequate ways, for

All that is true, by whosoever spoken, is from the Holy Ghost. –St. Ambrose

In my endeavor to lay some steel on the railroad track to O, I began with the following noirish passage, called Cracking the Case of the Missing God. If nothing else, it is more proof for why this book is unpublishable. Rather, it is for your eyes only, supposing you are one of us, and not working for the clampdown:

Now that we’ve staked out the Cosmos for suspicious activity in Book I and interrogated the anthropic informant in Book II, it is time to take a magnifying glance at the Big Kahuna at the center of it all. Having deposed every immaterial witness from Abraham to Zoroaster, we know this suspect goes by any number of aliases, from Adonai to Zeus. However, our investigation has concluded that in this metaphysical whodunnit each of our three perps is in cahoots with the others and somehow involved in the scheme—

Accessories to the climb?

Correct: our three confederates are all implicated in the caper, and we aim to throw this book at them, all 400 pages. Having placed the Cosmos and Anthropos under surveillance, we can trace them to a silent partner whose fingerprints are all over the evidence, and who seems to be pulling the strings. Although we have a sketch of this Mister Big, we have thus far obtained conflicting testimony as to his exact identity and whereabouts.

Two points: first, you are no Raymond Chandler, and second, not even Philip Marlowe can know the unknowable, so what makes you think you’re qualified to put God’s business on the street?

Because doing so is actually an analogue of literally everything on our side of the veil, for we can again know a great deal about anything in existence but not know everything about a single thing. Thus there is circumstantial evidence of the divine presence everywhere, hence a dynamic complementarity of endless intelligibility within a depthless mystery, whether in the material cabin down below or the great wide open above.

If cosmotheandrism is to work, the first thing we need to do is get the Theos out of the clouds and back here in the Cosmos and Anthropos. We know that we are in the Cosmos, and that the Cosmos is in us. For example, think of how light signals broadcast throughout the universe extend to our own inside, where their meaning can be decoded. This extends from the subatomic to the astrophysical, all the way back to the very birth of the Cosmos in which we find ourselves, meaning that the Big Bang itself is somehow inside the intellect. We also know that neither the Anthropos nor Cosmos are necessary, rather, contingent upon a higher principle we have thus far been designating as O.

This is all tied up with something I’ve been thinking about for years, since long before I stumbled onto cosmotheandrism. Because in this business of metaphysics you can’t sleep for trying to figure out the tricks the tenured try to pull on you. You’re like the guy in the philosophy section at Barnes & Noble, browsing the books to see how they bewitch you with language. And then one night you get to thinking how you could play that game. And do it smart. Because you’ve got that piece of sheepskin in your hands, the one that alleges a PhD in psychology, so you too can pretend to know more than you do. And then you figure all you need is an angle, a new way to package the old truths. And suddenly Petey taps you on the shoulder and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you...

Look, I’m not trying to canonize myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn’t fight it hard enough. The stakes were not only a handful of readers, but also the very nature of God — a God who’d never done me any dirt.

I get it: Triple Indemnity.

∞

Where do we begin to look for the missing God?

Just listen to your heart. That’s what I do.

You mean conventional religiosity? It certainly seems to satisfy the spiritual needs of countless people, and I sometimes even envy their uncomplicated faith. Of course, some folks go to church just to signify, others to make a date with their neighbor’s wife, but in any group of people you’re going to get your share of long-tongued liars, midnight riders, gamblers, ramblers, backbiters, and credulous chopraphiles.

But ideally we should listen with the heart and brain — the RH and LH, respectively — so long as we are aware of both the capabilities and limitations of the latter. Ironically, modern man tends to exaggerate both, on the one hand presuming a promethean intellect that can utilize science to disclose the secrets of the world, on the other hand pretending to enclose us in genetics, neurology, or the projected forms of our own consciousness, such that we can know diddly about daddy, or of the real nature of the extracranial world outside the silo. But our aim is to infiltrate Celestial Central and finally get to the bottom of the top of this mystery.

At the Edge of the Anthropic Horizon

Before continuing further, a brief reset: Cosmos and Anthropos are related and open to one another in such a way that the rational structures of the former mirror the rationality of the latter, which in turn requires the courtesy of an explanation, i.e., a sufficient reason.

This reason cannot something from within either term, rather, beyond them. It is man the questioner who, “with his inquiring rationality,” is “the boundary point where it [the Cosmos] is open beyond itself, and where the mystery of its meaning becomes disclosed, insofar as he allows his mind to fall under the power of revelation from beyond” (Torrance). Translated into cosmotheandric terms, this means that beyond the subjective horizon of the Anthropos is the ground of being itself, symbolized as O.

The Cosmos is not, nor can it be, imprisoned within its own absurcularity, rather, it is “an essentially open system with an ontological and intelligible reference beyond its own limits…” As per Gödel, it is consistent but not complete, featuring a hierarchy of levels “which are open upward but not reducible downward, for no one level provides the sufficient reason for its own contingent order,” rather, “only through reference to another level or to other levels beyond it.” Our Cosmos “is thus to be regarded as an essentially open system for precisely as an intelligible whole it requires a sufficient reason beyond itself” (ibid.), and that’s all there is to it.

One might even say that the two trees we’ve been discussing go precisely to this description, since the Tree of Life must be open, relational (or substance-in-relation), and ultimately personal, with a vertical axis — or trunk — running perpendicular to its Theo-logical roots above and Cosmo-logical leaves below. Between these two terms is our own Anthropo-logic. But these are unified in the one Logos present in each.

∞

Now, “The full meaning of ‘to be’ is not just ‘to be present,’ but ‘to be actively present’“ (Clarke). The relationality of this active presence “is a primordial dimension of every real being, inseparable from its substantiality.” Being is an act, and the act of being is relational: “it is turned towards others by its self-communicating action. To be fully is to be substance-in-relation” (ibid.).

But why? Because every being — every existent that partakes of being — is an image of the very Principle that too is irreducibly substance-in-relation. That every lower being has both an in-itself and towards-others dimension finds its ground in the triple primacy of our ultimate Principle.

Josef Pieper (cited by Clarke) agrees that to exist

means “to be able to relate” and “to be the sustaining subject at the center of a field of reference.” Only in reference to an inside can there be an outside. Without a self-contained “subject” there can be no “object.”

We might say that subject is to interiority as object is to exteriority, and the two are always related or linked. Moreover “The higher the form of intrinsic existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness to reality, also the more profound and comprehensive becomes the sphere of this relatedness…” (Pieper). And the Anthropos is the highest and most related center of relatedness in the Cosmos, in that we are internally related to immanent matter, to other persons, and to the intersubjective Principle of both these possibilities.

With this in mind, we now have a conceptual basis for understanding the receptivity and relationality in and of the Theos. Is the Theos related to us? How could it not be, if the Theos is the very principle of substance-in-relation? Moreover, this divine receptivity “should be looked on not as essentially a sign of imperfection [or] poverty,” but rather, as a “positive aspect or perfection of being” (Clarke). In the absence of the perfections of relation and receptivity, the Theos would be enclosed within itself, and therefore as absurcular as a closed Cosmos or Anthropos. In other words, the very ground and possibility of openness and relationally is situated in O.

∞

The Anthropos cannot be surpassed from within the Cosmic order, for its sufficient reason is to know and express the Absolute.

He fits right in there, in the Cosmos.

Thus, in the words of Thomas,

it is possible for the perfection of the whole universe to have its existence in one single being.... the ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain is that in it is reflected the whole order of the universe and its causes.

And “Since the person is not something added onto being from the outside, but is the highest perfection and most intense expression of existential being itself, the person takes on more intensely the whole dynamism of existence as expansive, self-communicating act...” (Clarke).

“Self-transcendence” writes Clarke,

is thus of the very essence of all personal development at its highest.... Only by reaching beyond the human can we succeed in becoming fully human. To refuse to do so condemns us to fall short of the human itself. To be a human person fully means to self-transcend toward the Infinite.

Therefore, “The fullness of personal development turns out to be a losing or letting go of oneself that is simultaneously and by that very fact a new finding of oneself at a deeper level.”

I wonder if the Theos does something similar, i.e., discover itself by letting go of itself?

That will be a question for Book III, but in Christianity there is the concept of God’s kenosis, which is the archetypal or quintessential “self-emptying” or “self-giving” of Father to Son, returning via the Holy Spirit. By emptying into the Son, the Theos does not “lose” its divinity, rather eternally actualizes it as Fatherhood.

In so doing, the Theos doesn’t diminish itself, rather engenders the partner for an eternal dia-logos, from which proceeds a lively tria-logos. This would imply that the expansive giving (or creation) of the Cosmos is situated in this ontologically prior giving and receiving within the Godhead — as if creation is a reflection of this more primordial spiral, thus accounting for the openness of both Cosmos and Anthropos.

The bottom line is that the very nature of the Theos is “intrinsically ordered toward self-communication.” Thus, we might say that the microanthropos (us) reflects the macroanthropos (Theos), such that in both there is the in-itself substance of being, and the towards-others relationality, neither reducible to the other. “No wonder then,” writes Clarke, “that self-communication is written into the very heart of all beings, as finite but positive images of their Source.”

That really says it all — although one can always say more, since we’re dealing here with the Infinite. For anthropic being expands onward, upward, outward, and inward, such that “the life of every human person unfolds as a journey of the spirit through an ever-developing spiral circulation between self-presence and active self-expressive presence,” or “between inward-facing self-possession and outward-facing openness to the other” — toward both horizontal others and the vertical Other. This Other, colloquially known as God, is the term with which we notify the universe that it is not everything (Dávila). Computer scientist Christoph Benzmüller, working with Gödel’s ideas, concluded that “God, by the most widely used metaphysical definition, necessarily exists. You cannot conceive of a world in which he does not exist.”

I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life!

It is now time to look into this transcendent ground and try to figure out what else goes on up there, so maybe we can die with a smile on our face without feelin’ like the good lord gypped us. So Goodnight, sweet Anthropos. See you on the other side, in Book III.

Reality is a Person-to-Person Call

To review: like all animals we have instincts ordered to the things of this world that draw us like magnets. However, the Anthropos has an ineradicable instinct for transcendence, such that we are pulled vertically toward its fulfillment; the “luminous fullness of meaningfulness draws me with the whole spontaneous pull of my nature toward the real existence of the Infinite Good as a magnet.” Only in this direction can we locate the Cosmic Area Rug that really pulls the Cosmos together.

To repeat: it is as if the infinite positive plenitude of Celestial Central is mirrored by a “negative plenitude” in us, this latter being “an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less.” Note that this is only possible because we are as internally related to the metaphysical ground of the Cosmos as we are to the peripheral entailments disclosed by science. Thus, “our dynamism for the infinite turns out to be a remarkably eloquent reverse image and pointer toward God as He is in Himself, beyond all possible finites.”

                                                                   ∞

The Academy of Cosmotheandric Arts & Sciences is proud to announce the winner for best — and worst — performance in a supporting role: Homo sapiens sapiens!
Best because of his capacity for the Infinite, worst because in choosing the wrong tree and enclosing himself in finitude, man started a joke which started the whole world crying.

Oh no.

∞

As we approach the end of Book II, it is time to proclaim the disquieting part out loud: the Anthropos is not am accidental feature of the Cosmos, rather, a reflection of its first principle, which is to say, the Person.

He’s the man for his time ’n place.

But to repeat what was said in the Introduction, this ultimate principle has a triune structure, and while we will be alluding to the Christian Trinity, for our more purely metaphysical purposes we will treat it as a necessary principle of being, as opposed to an arbitrary dogmatic assertion. This is not to downplay the Christian claim, rather, in order to include everyone in our meta-cosmically ecumenical discussion, for cosmotheandrism may be expressed in a diversity of ways.

It’s all pretty harmless.

Yes, no offense intended to Christians or non-Christians. For again, there is more than one way to skin the cataphasis of this mysterious whole in three, the Trinity being just one of them. Moreover, irrespective of the words we use, they always point to the thing itself which is beyond words, especially in this case, where we are trying to express the Absolute via the relative, or Infinitude via the finite.

Language problem!

Analogously, as Einstein said of physics, it “is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.” Likewise, here we will deploy this triune language as an abstract means for expressing the concrete nature of the noumenon — the Theos — and by extension, the Anthropic phenomenon.

Sure, I gotcha.

∞

Clarke asks “What is so special about the person that situates it at the apex of the order of being?” What makes us think we’re so special? The answer is that the ultimate Ground of the Cosmos must be “personalized being,” such that “the rest of the universe derives from personal being.” And in order for the Cosmos “to make full sense it would have to include personal created beings within it — in a word, it would have to be for persons.”

The main point here is that persons by definition are intersubjective, and therefore presume an other, which is to say, an I-Thou relationship, or an underlying unity of persons. Put conversely, “What could possibly be the point of a created universe entirely plunged in the darkness of unconsciousness, unable to know or appreciate that it is there at all?”

Now, we are all persons, but what is a person? And how is such a thing possible? By virtue of what principle? Physics? Biology? No, in neither case can we get here — especially in here — from out there. This is the One Free Miracle of personal subjectivity without which nothing could be known:

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence — or consciousness or subjectivity — and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon).

Clarke maintains that Christian thinkers have tended not to adequately appreciate the paradigm shift entailed by the revelation of a triune Godhead. He quotes Ratzinger to the effect that “person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.”

Therefore,

In the relational notion of person developed within the theology of the Trinity lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.

This revolution in thought involves the recognition that ultimate reality is a personal substance-in-relation (Axioms 11 and 12). For it means that Ultimate Reality is neither substance nor relation, but rather, an irreducible complementarity of the two. This has extraordinary metaphysical implications, none of which, by the way, negate what science reveals about the world, but extend and deepen it (not to mention explaining how the scientific enterprise is even possible).

Again, a great many metaphysical implications follow. For example, with the recognition that reality is substance-in-relation, we could recognize a priori that the Newtonian paradigm of reality, useful as it was, had to be wrong in the ultimate sense, since the Cosmos does not and cannot consist of extrinsically related atomistic units. For the same reason, we can say on the political plane that Lockean individualism is way off base, since its anthropology is a non-starter.

In an abstract sense, the person as such features an “indissoluble complementarity” between an “in-itself dimension of being” and a “towards-others aspect” (Clarke). This extends to being itself, which is intrinsically diffusive and self-communicating. Ultimately, this is why the Cosmos is intelligible to our intelligence, for these two — intelligence and intelligibility — are intrinsically related. Again, if this isn’t the case, then we end up in a closed, Kantian universe of metaphysical ønanism.

Being itself is an ec-static process of self-communicative being-in-action. Which not only explains a lot, but explains everything — literally, because it explains how we can explain anything. What is the alternative?

Suppose a being that really exists, but does not act in any way, does not manifest itself in any way to other beings. There would be no way for anything else to know that it exists; it would make no difference at all to the rest of reality; practically speaking, it might just as well not be at all — it would in fact be indistinguishable from non-being (Clarke).

If this were the nature of reality, then each existent thing “would be locked off in total isolation from every other. There would not be a connected universe” (ibid.). There might be individual substances but no intrinsic relations, like discrete particles with no unifying field, so to speak.