Catch a Wave and You’re Sittin’ On Top of the Cosmos

Yesterday’s post concluded with the familiar claim that the Anthropos not only straddles the Great Divide between the creaturely and divine, but that this is the only place we can ever actually be. This transitional space — the In Between — is not empty but it is subtle, much like the interpersonal space between you and anyone else. Everyone knows that there are some people with whom we instantaneously vibe, but we shouldn’t take this to imply that there are only good vibrations, because when we are repelled by someone it means we’re just vibing in the negative sense. We are like magnets with positive and negative poles: depending on which way they are configured, the magnets will attract or repel one another.

Now, religion is not just a fad 'cause it's been goin’ on so long. Its ubiquity suggests that man is always and everywhere attracted to the yonder horizon; put conversely, this or that religion is an expression of the relation between the poles of immanence and transcendence, Anthropos and Theos, intellect and O, etc. However, any “crystalized” religious doctrine runs the risk foreclosing the more wavelike field between man and O, which goes precisely to Axioms one through four of cosmotheandrism, in that we have (1) absolute certitude that the situation between man and O is complementary (2), open (3), and relatonal (4).

And as we explained in Book II, this relational field is ordered more to the RH than the LH, and in fact, is more or less unknowable by the latter. But LH and RH are also subject to the Axioms, so they too are — or should be — complementary, open, and relational. Which means that there isn’t just a relational field between intellect and O, but within the intellect itself. Thus, our own interior relationality is a mirror of both the relationality between us and O, but also the relationality within O itself.

In short, irreducible relationality — onto-relation — is everywhere and in every thing. For which reason no less a surfer than Thomas Aquinas says that the doctrine of creation does not advert to some kind of event in the past, rather, to a relation in the present: it is “the very dependence of the created being upon the principle from which it is produced. And thus, creation is a kind of relation” (emphasis mine). In other words, being is always and everywhere related to its nonlocal ground and principle. And this principle is not a static or lifeless structure, rather, a dynamic field or wave. In this context, a spiritual practice involves getting away from the shady LH turf and catching some rays in the sunny RH surf.

That's all there is to the coastline craze?

In a sense, yes: the only way to confirm the existence of these invisible waves is to catch one. Artists in particular know all about the waves of creative intent that result in the magic of creation. Clearly, genuine creativity is much more like catching a wave of inspiration than cranking out a predetermined product.

Sounds like the greatest sport around.

Nevertheless, those who don't try it just have to put it down.

The deeper point is that for cosmotheandrism God and man are not two, but nor are they one. If they were one, then there would be no waves between us, but if they were an absolutely separate two, then the waves wouldn’t lead anywhere. Rather, the waves are the relational third between Creator and creation: at once a distinction and a unity, or unity-in-distinction. We are always “at one” with God, but the oneness is in the relation that links the two terms. By definition nothing could be radically separate from God, rather, in relation to God, in the creative tension between immanence and transcendence.

We equally reject monism and dualism for metaphysical trialism, relational triadism, triadic non-dualism, translogical trialectics, in a word, cosmotheandrism. The only way out of monism and dualism is by riding the cosmotheandric waves that constitute the motion in the ocean of being.

God is by definiton not somewhere but everywhere, so there is nowhere he is not. This adverts to the holofractal nature of existence, wherein, to plagiaphrase Joyce, a part so ptee does duty for the holos. In this context, what we call the “Incarnation” cannot be the establishment of a new kind of reality, rather its restoration, so to speak. For it is not as if we could ever actually be radically separate from anything, much less from God. But certainly relations have become frayed, if Genesis 3 is to be believed. Nevertheless, to be at all is already to be-in-relation, and one might say that the Incarnation serves the purpose of making this plain once and for all of us.

Having said that, take a lesson from a top-notch surfer boy: there are other ways to talk about this relation, so meet me by the shore tomorrow and we’ll dive into some of them.

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.

Waste and Void

Yesterday we spoke of the Theos breaking the fourth wall of spacetime, which implies a kind of top-down movement from Creator to creation, or from O to both Cosmos and Anthropos. We can also consider the matter from our end, in that Gödel’s theorems prove that any frame we use to describe the universe is always already broken, which is to say, incomplete: wherever we are, we must appeal to a higher order in order to know where we are, and this appeal is in the mode of faith, not knowledge per se. Rather, faith is the link between two orders, however we conceptualize them.

For example, the working scientist has faith in the intelligibility of the world without being able to account for this intelligibility. To paraphrase Polanyi, this wholly reasonable faith takes form in the implicit knowledge of an impending discovery — or in other words, we believe in order to understand, but we never stop at any mere understanding.

Here the recovering alcoholic knows something that eludes the sober materialist, insofar as the former comes to believe in a Power greater than himself that may restore him to sanity: the sanity is posterior to the belief. This belief or faith merely establishes diplomatic relations with this Power before being able to say what it is or does. Likewise the scientist who must believe in a power greater than science in order to arrive at any sane ideas about the nature of reality. In other words, he must retain a stance of openness toward whatever realm being explored. Supposing we enclose the world in an ideological frame, then we have broken off relations with reality.

Cosmotheandrism is not explicitly about politics, but it certainly has political implications. For example, think back on what happened the night of November 3, 2026, when an electoral tsunami washed over the nation. Whatever one’s perspective, the tsunami obliterated the existing political frame, and now what?

Too soon to tell.

In an open Cosmos it is always too soon to tell, because no one can tell ahead of time what the Cosmos will tell us. All knowledge is preliminary to new discoveries that no one can foresee. We cannot deduce the future from the present — much less ordain the future — for as we have said, reality itself is the Mother of All Unintended Consequences. Again, for Polanyi, reality is characterized by its capacity to surprise us with new discoveries. Thus, a good theory is fruitful whereas a bad one is a dead end.

Nevertheless, it is still unsettling to wake up and find our frame lying in pieces on the ground, whether it is the geocentric frame destroyed by heliocentrism, or creationism by Darwinism, Newton by Einstein, or the Gutenberg Galaxy by the internet. This latter is happening in real time as we make the turbulent transition from literacy to post-literacy. I don’t believe it will be possible for any of us who still reside in the Old World of literacy to ever grow accustomed to this new post-truth world of relativism, subjectivism, and emotionalism, wherein every man is his own priest, philosopher, scientist, and journalist.

This latter world is inherently unstable and turbulent, since it has essentially declared independence from the Absolute, so there is no longer any controlling mythos-frame shared by everyone. A new frame could only be imposed from the top-down via authoritarianism. Which only enables more turbulence. To pretend to know where the post-literate turbulence is headed is like pretending to know what will happen once the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, each lunatic dwelling in his own private delusion. It is not a matter of which one is the real Christ or Napoleon, rather, the recognition that no one is. But try telling that to the new saviors!

∞

Speaking of frames, Schuon writes that “The whole existence of the peoples of antiquity, and of traditional peoples in general, is dominated by two key-ideas, the idea of Center and the idea of Origin.” Thus reality is framed by Center and Origin, even if the Origin is the Big Bang and we are in the middle of it.

In reality, our two poles orient us to something in space and time pointing to what is beyond them. For example, the “sacred Center” is “the place where Heaven has touched the earth,” where “God has manifested Himself in order to pour forth His grace.” In short, it is any place where the breakthrough of grace — of vertical energies — is particularly noticeable: In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of midday.

Likewise, the Origin “is the quasi-timeless moment when Heaven was near and terrestrial things were still half-celestial.” Or, “in the case of civilizations having a historical founder,” it is “the period when God spoke,” which is to say, broke the fourth wall — as occurred in the Axial Age vis-à-vis the Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers, Upanishadic seers, Taoist dudes, Buddhist pneumanauts, et al.

Incoming from T.S. Eliot, who speaks of

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time.

A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.

Otherwise — absent this vertical ingression —

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.

Again! I hate it when that happens. Who can breathe in such a place?

No one can, hence

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

The transcendence of things is the salt that seasons their blandness.

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

The waters of the West are stagnant, but the spring is unpolluted.

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

Each of these aphorisms goes to both God and man breaking the fourth wall. And we needn’t dwell on the meaning of Christmas, but there it is: the story of Jesus’ birth is the quintessence of God breaking the fourth wall of spacetime.

Granted, breaking the fourth wall is usually inappropriate. Most of the time, in order for art to function as it is supposed to, the frame must be respected. Typically we want to abandon ourselves to the illusion of art, not be reminded that it is an illusion. One of the reasons why breaking the frame can be effective is because of its unexpectedness. If it happened all the time, the novelty would quickly wear off: if everyone is the savior, then no one is.

It’s not just a film or play that has a frame, but all works of art. Art always involves some kind of boundary separating it from the world, such as a literal frame around a painting. Without the frame, we wouldn’t know what to look at.

In the case of the Incarnation, what is the frame? It depends, for there are multiple frames or hermeneutical perspectives, from the literal to the psychological to the cosmic and more. At the very least, there are the traditional four senses of scripture, the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical.

In the most obvious and literal sense, the frame is a particular man named Jesus. However, this man is embedded in a particular tribe, but also within a narrative that goes back to the creation of man and even to creation itself. At the far end of the narrative frame is his return, but meanwhile life goes on. I can’t worry about that, man.

Now, no one has to reinvent the telephone or computer every time we use them, but that’s not the way it is with regard to art or scripture, which necessitate a personal engagement on our part. There is a passive element, as in suspending disbelief, but also an active one, as per the various hermeneutical frameworks referenced above, not to mention the wild card of the Holy Spirit that blows where it wants, gosh!

In the case of both art and scripture, the purpose of the frame is to convey something that is beyond the frame, just as, on a more mundane level, we use words to convey a meaning not reducible to the words themselves. Which is why a literal interpretation of scripture defeats its purpose, for it reverses the vector flow of meaning — like focusing on the finger instead of that to which the finger is pointing.

Now, if man is created, this implies that he is analogous to a work of art with multiple levels of meaning. But he will ultimately point to his creator, just as Macbeth points to Shakespeare or the Mona Lisa to Rembrandt.

Man as such breaks the frame of the Cosmos and cannot be contained by it. Or, we have one foot in the Cosmos and one foot out. We are existentially amphibious, which is to say, material and spiritual. Matter cannot literally contain the soul, rather, vice versa: the soul — again, literally — contains the body, which means that it transcends the material. It is only in this transcendent space where intelligence meets intelligibility, where mind encounters truth, where the soul perceives beauty, and where we encounter a power that can restore us to metaphysical sanity.

This is another way of saying that this is an open Cosmos, open to its transcendent source. And that we in turn are uniquely open at our end, in that the very principle of being is reflected in us. Conversely, if the Cosmos were indeed enclosed within itself, then man cannot be “about” anything transcending himself. He can be about “selfish genes,” or neural activity, or class warfare, or a blind will to power, but these reduce to empty frames that are about nothing.

Let’s just say that the only way to repair our broken frame is for it to be inbroken by something from outside the frame. Otherwise, waste and void.

Truth is in history, but history is not the truth.

History commits suicide by denying all transcendence. For history to be of concern to us, there must be something that transcends it: there must be something in history more than history.

Homo Ludens and Theo Ludens

The concept of play — both Anthropic and Theic — is so foundational that it either requires its own Axiom or must be the “activity” that results from the other 12. One might say it is the “dynamism” both within and without the Theos. For example, Rahner suggests that

All play — just as much as every task which we set ourselves to master with real earnestness of purpose — is an attempt to approximate to the Creator, who performs his work with the divine seriousness which its meaning and purpose demand, and yet with the spontaneity and effortless skill of the great artist he is, creating because he wills to create and not because he must.

To repeat what was said yesterday, this “mingling of the light-hearted and the serious is a flower that grows only midway betwixt heaven and earth,” or in the Anthropic space between transcendence and immanence:

Maximus the Confessor expounds this truth in his great dissertation on the playing of the Logos. When God himself breaks into our apparently closed order of play, something occurs that is completely beyond the power of any human words to express. Then, we can only be like Paul and speak of the weakness and foolishness of God…

You know you’re in utopia when the game never ends, for “the Christian has never ceased to use the concept of play as a verbal figure that most aptly describes, as far as he is able to conceive it, the state of the blessed in the world to come.” Thus, in the game of time we acquire skills that will serve us well in the game of eternity.

This is only the preseason?

Why not? “Our true playing and our true merriment will begin when this world has been left behind.” Then “The end will be even as the beginning — an eternal childhood.”

Too sappy.

Agreed. Let’s back up a couple of steps and inquire into the conditions that render a game possible: first, there must be rules, but the rules cannot determine the outcome, rather, are the boundary conditions that enable us to freely play within them. Given the rules, we adopt strategies and tactics to play, but the rules don’t dictate the strategies.

Our Cosmos is full of immaterial rules, from the laws of physics to the Rights of Man.

Who’s the referee?

Reality. Which of course doesn’t put an end to cheating, because how many concepts, philosophies, and ideologies operate outside the bounds of reality? The list is endless. There are even doctrines that render any game impossible, such as determinism at one end, anarchism at the other. But the game is always played in the space between order and freedom.

What sets cosmotheandrism apart from the rest — but not really — is the claim that God not only invented the rules but participates in the game. For example, the Logos is rationality itself, which is to say rules. And yet, for Christianity the Logos participates in the very game enabled by the Logos.

The rules incarnate as a player?

We see this same principle expressed in mythic terms in the Bhagavad Gita, in that Krishna operates largely through the concept of lila, or divine play, sport, spontaneous action. etc. He plays within the Cosmos because playfulness is intrinsic to the supreme reality. Taoism too expresses a similar notion, albeit in a more impersonal way via the concept of wu wei, which is to say, effortless and unforced action or “non-doing.” And we’ve already discussed Judaism, with Wisdom hersoph always playing beside the Creator. Call the game what you want, but the same principle applies:

Now, speaking of invariant rules, there are four dimensions in the universe woven into a single continuous fabric known as spacetime, this latter constituting the visible or — at least ponderable — side of the Cosmic Area Rug. However, we know — or ought to know at any rate — that the Cosmos is neither self-sufficient nor self-explanatory. In other words, it is contingent and incomplete, or rather, its completion requires that it be related to its own source: the Cosmos is the entailment of a higher principle that is not the entailment of anything else. This latter surely is, but mere isness is not enough; rather its isness must somehow spill over into creation, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.

Every religion in some sense involves God breaking our four-dimensional wall, as when an actor does so by directly addressing the audience in a play or movie. There are degrees of breakage, from flashing a covert Jim Halpert look at the camera, to jumping out of the film altogether, as in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Now, if creation is the vertical nexus between time and eternity, then we should not be surprised that history is full of knowing winks, ironic smiles, and mischievous glances that reveal to us the author of history — or in other words, that break through the domed stadium of spacetime enclosure.

But how? We supposedly live in a 4D world, but are we actually bound by these dimensions? If we were, then we could never know a timeless truth, perceive transcendent beauty, or undertake a virtuous act, for each of these involves the apprehension of something beyond the walls of history. So, if we can break the fourth wall, it must be because God broke it first.

Not to abuse his name again, but Gödel’s theorems imply that man qua man uniquely breaks through the walls of logic, reason, and formal systems. Thus, we have access to a transcendent dimension of unprovable truths. One might say that in knowing the rules of the cosmic game, we have partially transcended the game.

As for God making the first move, ancient Judaism maintained that the temple was where God liked to dwell, while for Christians the temple is human nature itself. More generally, religions have their sacred mountains, forests, rivers, and relics, each communicating something of what is beyond them.

There are, of course, religions of pure transcendence — e.g., Gnosticism — in which the point of the game is to flee immanence and ascend into a better world for better people. Pantheism is the opposite, conflating God and Cosmos, so the game is ordered to no higher end.

But if God is necessarily in every place and at every time, then it’s not so much a matter of looking for God as a way to look — for example, with aesthetic eyes. For example, as Dávila says, From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints. These footprints imply a big foot, so one might say that God is a Bigfoot sighting. God the necessary condition of art, while we are the sufficient condition, so The work of art is a covenant with God.

This is true of any creative activity, in which there is a mysterious x factor that makes the transcendent whole greater than the sum of the immanent parts. In art, 2+2 is always > 4. In bad art, 2+2 = 4 or even less.

Now, what if art is but an exalted form of play? And if it is true that Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says, then it is a case of certain aesthetic experiences shattering the fourth wall and initiating us into a larger transcendent dimension.