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.

Rasslin’ with O

The previous post concluded that things are getting pretty serious right about now. Because I’ll tell you what: we know the heart of darkness, so we know what is at stake. It’s never easy to rassle with the devil and come out on top. But what is life itself but a rasslin’ match between the poles of O and Ø? Let the record show that I am not pleased with the following sections, but hopefully they will lead to something better as we rassle our way through Book III.

                                                        ∞

At this point I think we’ve learned our lesson, so it is safe to continue using the G-word instead of the O-unword.

What was the lesson?

Simply that God cannot be enclosed in God — that the word is not the thing, but points to the thing. The thing itself — like any thing — is infinitely knowable but absolutely unknowable per se. For which reason Augustine remarked that “If you think that you comprehend God, it is not God.”

Further to the theological left, Meister Eckhart has many curious sayings that go to the heart of this orthoparadox, and one might even say that this is one of the overriding themes of his emphatically apophatic mystical theology, which is both easy to understand and perhaps easier to misunderstand — for example, “I pray to God to rid me of God.” Now, how does this make sense? It actually makes perfect nonsense, because elsewhere he says that “God is greater than God,” so don’t conflate the two.

Don’t just put them in your pocket?

No, anywhere but there. Or one will get mixed up with the other and become just God. Which it is.

That some kind of Zen thing?

Far from it. Or actually close to it, as in First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is, the point being that the thing itself doesn’t undergo change, rather we change our perspective on it, as in satori, kenshō, moksha and other experiences of vertical liberation from the annoying realm of maya. In Eckhart’s case, he is really praying for a novel experience and perspective on God — perhaps, in modern terms, the escape from a merely abstract left-brain concept to the living reality experienced by the right.

This is just an example of what is called limit discourse, which has to do with speaking about things at the horizon of human understanding and experience. Thus this discourse — or in Eckhart’s case, deuscourse — abounds with paradox, contraries, and antitheses. It is perfect nonsense, so long as perfect is the operative word. For example, “Now the moment I flowed out from the Creator all creatures stood up and shouted: ‘Behold, here is God!’”

Where I come from, there’s a story about someone calling Eckhart on the phone: “Is God there?” “Yes.” “Can I talk to him?” “You already are.”

Along these lines, perhaps the most shocking entailment of cosmotheandrism is that the Theos is in “need” — note well the scary quotes — of Anthropos. As we stipulated in the Introduction, this will require a great deal of discretion and qualification, and yet, Eckhart just blurts out the secret, for “just as I can do almost nothing without God, so too can God accomplish nothing apart from me.” But this same orthoparadox is reflected in, for example, mystical Judaism: “Without our conscious, willed, inspired participation. God is incomplete; God needs us to realize God’s design for the world. We are co-creators through God’s grace with God Itself,” this being because someone has to serve as the meeting point of O and Ø and “be the ‘place’ where the fusion of all dimensions is effected…” (Matt).

Over the line!

Definitely over the line if one misunderstands the seriously playful text of the Zohar, which is “peppered with invented words,” and in which salty “Puns, parables, and puzzles abound.” Eckhart too, like any mystic, often relies on paradox, exaggeration, humor, wordplay, etc., to talk about what is over the subjective horizon.

Linguistic shock and awe.

Correct: it may look more like theological shuck and jive, but one purpose of such mystical formulations is to vault us out of our familiar way of looking at things, in particular, how not to think about God. Once we learn how not to speak of God, we are halfway to speaking rightly of him. Frankly, it’s not all that different from the sorts of puzzling things Jesus himself says, such as Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted, Many who are first will be last, and the last first, or He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.

As to our theomorphism, note the orthoparadox: “You should know that nothing is as dissimilar as the Creator and any creature. In the second place, nothing is as similar as the Creator and any creature” (Eckhart). In normal speech this would violate the principle of noncontradiction, because how can the same thing be completely similar and dissimilar to us?

You asking me?

Better yet, I’m telling you: the Godhead is both similar and dissimilar to and in itself, which is at the heart of a trinitarian metaphysic. Expressed in human language, the Father and Son — or the unoriginate Ground and its engendered expression — are absolutely identical in substance but radically different in terms of relation. If you think about it, this otherness must be the most radical distinction we can conceive, and yet, the most complete unity. And this same substance-in-relation (Axiom 11) is reflected in everything in existence herebelow. It is why the creation can be separate from the Creator and yet not separate at all, for the creative Principle — or Principle of creation — is first “distinct” even from and within itself. Absent this prior principle of distinction there could be no distinction anywhere at any time. Both the Cosmos and Anthropos are suffused with an aboutness that is grounded in a prior supra-ontological Aboutness within the Godhead. Which is, of course, why we can presume to say things about God, albeit never in any final or complete way.

Note again that the Anthropos as such is an orthoparadoxical “species of individuals,” or a common substance with diverse manifestations. It’s a conundrum: “If our humanity makes us all the same, what makes us different?” It can’t be just our membership in Club Anthropos, “because our humanity is the very thing which unites us with all other humans” (Ward). So, why are we not like other social animals, e.g., bees, ants, and journalists? Ward correctly points out that “there must be something else, of an altogether different sort, that is in principle not shareable,” something that “makes you not just a human being but this very human being,” that is, “a non-repeatable individuating entity.”

What could this be? The cosmotheandric answer is that we are the image and likeness of a Theos which is likewise a con-spiracy of one-of-a-kind persons sharing a common substance. Every person, by virtue of being one, is a unique instantiation of personhood that cannot be shared with others except by way of openness and intersubjective relationality via love, knowledge, empathic attunement, etc. Of course, two can become one, but only because the intersubjective oneness is ontologically prior to the separative twoness. Which is why one is the loneliest number.

Three dogs in a single pack?

That’s a dyslexic way of putting it, but yes.

Methodical Introduction To the Vision Outside of Which the World Makes No Sense

Our alibi for the verticalisthenic exercise which follows heeds Dávila’s advice that Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. Put conversely, to the extent that a religious vocabulary makes no sense in the modern world, it is because it cannot be expressed in the cutandry and wideawake terms of the left-brain scientism that pervades our culture.

Religion, of course, has been here for a long time, probably as long as Homo sapiens has been running aground. Which is actually a short time — only 300,000 years since version 1.0 reached the evolutionary market, and 50,000 to 60,000 years since our new and improved model hit the cosmic showroom, with such standard equipment as abstract thought, complex symbolic art, musical instruments, more sophisticated and diverse tools, rear-view historical mirrors, and antilock brains. Of course, we can only speculate as to the nature of paleolithic religion. No one knows exactly what they were doing or why they were doing it, but evidence of institutionalized ritual killing — AKA human sacrifice — appears no earlier as 5,000 BC.

Not such a promising start.

No, and one shudders to think what they were doing before that, but there is scattered evidence of trephining — which our ancestors just called drilling a hole in the skull — as long ago as 10,000 BC, and the psychologist in me wonders what was up with that? Perhaps it was to release an evil spirit, which is either crazier or not as crazy as it sounds, for in our time there are patients who cut themselves in order to manage or release anxiety and psychic pain, or conversely, to counteract emotional numbness. So, we’ll give these early brain surgeons a pass, because they no doubt had their reasons, even if insurance companies balked at reimbursing them for the procedure.

It is not until the so-called Axial Age, between 800 and 300 BC, that we see the widespread emergence of more humane and sophisticated religions and of speculative thought more generally, from Lao Tse, Buddha, and Zarathustra to the Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers. Voegelin characterizes this as a “great leap in being,” but of course, not everyone agrees. Some don’t like the idea because they think religion is absurd to begin with, and how can absurdity progress? At the other extreme, many of our faithful brethren don’t want their religion to be lumped in with others. But whatever their differences, what these axial pneumanauts mostly shared in common was the intuition of an underlying unity — a singular, transcendent source or harmony of being.

We have neither the time nor interest in detailing these mythological nexuses between time and eternity, or periphery and origin, but in every case there is not only the attempt to situate the Anthropos in a cosmic framework, but to tell us what we are supposed to do about it, from conventional moral dictates to more esoteric practices such as methodically meditating our way out of the world or taking a shortcut by gobbling a heroic dose of peyote. Which is not bad advice, given how difficult life must have been, plagued by violence, food insecurity, abbreviated lifespans, and a complete dearth of quality footwear.