I Am the True Wine

Picking up right where we left off yesterday -- with Eckhart -- the Meistero claims that "Nowhere does God dwell more properly than in his temple, the intellect..." (in McGinn). By which of course he doesn't mean the mind, or ego, or consciousness, or any of that.

Rather, he means what Schuon means by the term, which is to say, a "mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light."

The intellect is both the mirror and the light it reflects, and simply cannot be a purely natural phenomenon. It is not God, but then again it isn't not-God, since it is a Divine Spark -- similar to how daylight on earth isn't the sun, and yet, it isn't not the sun. Rather, it's nothing other than the sun, only radiated and dispersed to the cosmic periphery.

Let's face it, without the intellect, we couldn't even know about the existence of God, so it all has to start there in some form or fashion, no matter how watered down or distorted. It is what reduces the mayaplicity of the world to unity, whether scientific or religious:

"The Intellect ‘is divine,’ first because it is a knower -- or because it is not a non-knower -- and secondly because it reduces all phenomena to their Principle; because it sees the Cause in every effect, and thus surmounts, at a certain level, the vertiginous and devouring multiplicity of the phenomenal world" (ibid.).

The intellect is the key to metaphysical understanding and certitude: our reason "perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whilst Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical -- and proceeds by intuition. Intellection is concrete in relation to rational abstractions, and abstract in relation to the divine Concreteness" (ibid.).

When we talk about the Incarnation of the Word, I think this is more the Word we're talking about, i.e., Intellect vs. mere reason, the latter being a small subset of the former. Thus, Christ is the "cosmic intellect," not just some bubbleheaded Einstein writ large.

McGinn: "the essence of all Eckhart's preaching can be reduced to understanding that the intellect" is "something that has no existence apart from its inherence in the Word..."

Only like can know like; which is why "I say to you in everlasting truth that if you are unlike this Truth of which we want to speak, you cannot understand me" (Eckart). Again: the intellect can only know God because it is already of God, knowing following in the tracks of being.

The intellect, you could say, is timeless. The will, however, is intrinsically temporal, in that it "takes time" to do anything, whereas understanding occurs in a flash. Intellect and will are truth and way, respectively, and "there is no Truth that does not have its prolongation in the Way," just as "there is no intelligence that does not have its prolongation in the will..." (Schuon).

Jesus being the perfect concordance of the two -- Truth and Way, intelligence and will -- his Truth is his Way, and vice versa. Indeed, he even says so: "I am the way, the truth, and the life," not to mention, "I am the light of the world." And while we're at it, we might as well throw in the true vine, i.e., the one with its roots aloft and wine down below.

About the Way to this realization, "every human being must, out of love of God, strive to 'be what he is'" and "to disengage himself from the artificial superstructures that disfigure him..." (Schuon). As they say, no one is obligated to participate in the infrahuman pathologies of the world, at least if your wood beleaf.

Rather, our task is "to become once again a tree whose root is made of liberating certitude and whose crown is made of beatific serenity" (ibid.).

It could also be said: we face the supra-personal Divinity as pure Intellect; the personal God we face as a human being; and the God-man... we face as a child. Now while on the one hand these three relationships are separate, on the other hand they cannot be exclusively distinct. --Schuon

Things That Cannot Not Be

Continuing with the keys to the damn world enigma, AKA "the principles that determine everything else" (Schuon). These principles equate to metaphysics, precisely, which you could say consists of the laws that Cannot Not Be given the Way Things Are.

For example, Darwinism pretends to be a kind of ultimate law of biology. But in order to be a law at all, it requires a very specific kind of cosmos. A universe that will support life is so rare, that Darwinism will almost never even come up. Therefore, Darwinism cannot be the general law of biology.

Whereas science moves in the direction of facts to laws to principles, metaphysics moves in the opposite direction, beginning with the principles that illuminate everything -- and I do mean everything -- else.

An example of a starting principle that cannot not be is that the world is intelligible to intelligence. However, this is already a bifurcation of a deeper principle, which is to say that reality is composed of a Truth which reveals itself on one side as knowledge and on the other as knower.

Any alternative to what I just said is impossible -- i.e., incoherent, self-refuting, absurd, tenured, etc.

With metaphysics we "touch God" in a way, because this is not a human -- or at least merely human -- knowledge. Since it is knowledge that must be, it is knowledge that will always be, and is therefore timeless and transcendent. It will never be out of date. It is not derived from reason, but rather, "made of truth," so to speak. It is the substance of truth, hence its intrinsic certainty. It is why Jesus can confidently say "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (not to reduce his words to mere metaphysics, because in his unique case he is the Truth he is speaking).

"The foundation of metaphysical certitude is the coincidence between truth and our being; a coincidence that no ratiocination could invalidate." Thus, "things deriving from the Absolute become clear by their participation in the Absolute, hence by a 'superabundance of light' -- according to Saint Thomas -- which amounts to saying that they are proven by themselves."

That sounds like a tautology -- "proven by themselves" -- but it isn't. Imagine, for example (speaking of an abundance of Light), the Transfiguration of Jesus. It is followed immediately by Peter's recognition of Who This Really Is. Not only is it its own proof, but the proof is beyond the capacity of the apostles to fully assimilate: again, it is a superabundance of Light. So yes, you can have "too much proof," in that it overwhelms the (lower case r) reason.

Must be what happened to the OJ jury. Not to mention the FBI investigation of Hillary.

In any event, "universal truths draw their evidence not from our contingent thought, but from our transpersonal being, which constitutes the substance of our spirit and guarantees the adequacy of intellection" (Schuon).

Now, metaphysics is not God; rather, it is a kind of ladder to God. Or, it is the ladder God provides in order for the intellect to climb up to him. However, there are both ascending and descending energies along this ladder, just as old Jacob said upon his awakening.

Along these lines, Schuon is as helpful as ever:

"Metaphysics has as it were two great dimensions, the one 'ascending' and dealing with universal principles and the distinction between the Real and the illusory, and the other 'descending' and dealing on the contrary with the divine life in creaturely situations, and thus with the fundamental and secret 'divinity' of beings and of things..."

Whereas the first is more sober and static -- for it is Reason -- "the second is mysterious and paradoxical, seeming at certain points to contradict the first, or again, it is like a wine with which the Universe becomes intoxicated."

The first is like the ascent of Reason up the mountain of Spirit, while the second is the descent of Spirit down to the plains and valleys and hollers of maya, or appearance, or phenomena. It's probably good to practice both, since they are complementary, i.e., intellection and mysticism.

Of all our cosmic peeps, I think Eckhart might have pulled off this complementarity most successfully -- you know, words and music. Let's see if I can pluck an example from that very book.

Here, from page 3: "What the philosophers have written about the natures and properties of things agree [with the Bible], especially since everything that is true, whether in being or in knowing, in scripture or in nature, proceeds from the one root of truth.... therefore, Moses, Christ, and the Philosopher [i.e., Aristotle] teach the same thing, differing only in the way they teach, namely as worthy of belief, as probable and likely, and as truth" (emphasis mine).

As we know, the cosmos is a tree, its roots aloft, its leaves and branches down below. The leaves of science are only alive because they are connected to limbs and trunk. So don't be the sap. All our middling relativities are related by way of the Absolute-Father, and are only related in and by Him. In other words, everything in the cosmos is more or less related, literally.

The Keys to the Damn World Enigma

In Schuon's To Have a Center there is a very short chapter -- just under four pages -- called Fundamental Keys. Since I don't have much time this morning, let's see how quickly we can review these underlying principles of the whole existentialada, and transform ourselves into quasi-omniscient bobnoxious gnosis-alls.

It reminds me how Ray Charles could size up a woman merely by holding her wrist in his hand. Someone asked him, "Ray, how can holding a woman's wrist tell you everything about a woman?," to which he responded, "I didn't say it tells me everything about her. It tells me everything I need to know about her."

So, perhaps these fundamental keys tell us everything we need to know about the cosmos.

He begins with the three modes of the spiritual life: meditation, concentration, and prayer. You might say that these are the means through which we gently place our fingers around the delicate wrist of the cosmos.

For Schuon, meditation is "an activity of the intelligence in view of understanding universal truths," whereas concentration "is an activity of the will in view of assimilating these truths or realities existentially, as it were."

So the first relates to intelligence and understanding, while the second relates to will and assimilation; to the extent that we know truth, then we want to be in conformity with it. Truth without will is powerless, while will without truth is blind (and therefore not free).

The third mode (prayer) "is an activity of the soul with respect to God." Looked at a certain way, one could even say that the soul itself is a prayer, in that it is always grounded in and oriented to its source. Conscious prayer only makes the relation explicit.

Back to the first mode, which revolves around intelligence. What is intelligence, really? Its "first function" must be "to distinguish between the Absolute and the Relative."

Which only means that if you attend the typical university steeped in postmodern relativism, it is overwhelmingly likely that the end result will be a systematic undermining of the first function of intelligence! In short, you won't just be unintelligent, but cosmically stupid. Is it any wonder that this -- the illiberal, totolerantarian multiversity -- is the great source of Bernie Sanders' support?

In addition (and related) to the distinction between absolute and relative, intelligence ought to be able to distinguish between reality and appearance, the necessary and contingent, the eternal and temporal, essence and existence, or more generally, the vertical and horizontal. Someone trying to unpack this post in a horizontal mode will get øwhere.

For Schuon this principle applies even -- or perhaps especially -- to God. In other words, there is in God -- or better, our perception of God -- the absolute and relative, the universal and particular, the eternal and temporal.

All religions recognize this distinction in some manner, but don't generally include it in the public program, since most people either won't understand it or will misunderstand it. Look at the trouble Eckhart got into for talking about it!

This distinction ultimately comes down to apophatic and cataphatic modes of knowing (or approaching) God; the first goes to the Beyond-Being of God, while the second goes to his Being. Note in this context that the unKnowing of apophaticism is considered a higher and more blessed form of knowledge than any mere cataphatic knowing. Orthoparadox alert!

In Vedanta there is Nirguna Brahman (God without characteristics) and Saguna Brahman (with characteristics). In Christianity there is the ontological Trinity (what goes on "inside" God) and the economic Trinity (which includes its activity in the world).

I think of it as analogous to God having a "dark side" (like the dark side of the moon). Whatever of God is "visible" to us must only be the appearance of an infinitely greater reality that is unknown to us.

And that is all we have time for this morning. We'll forge another key tomorrow, or at least try to pick the lock on heaven's door.

Vote Lovertarian

Just flipping through Love Alone is Credible and I see this interesting observation: only with Jesus' own "abandonment by God" (on Good Friday) and subsequent descent into hell (on Holy Saturday) does "deliberate atheism" become "possible for the very first time." This is because "without a genuine concept of God, there could be no true atheism."

This implies that Jesus is not only the world's first atheist, but by far the most thoroughly committed. After all, he is willing to forego God to the depths of hell, as far and as long as it takes to redeem fallen man -- whose very fallenness revolves around his alienation from God.

This is a point Balthasar emphasizes again and again, not just here, but in many of his works. There is a logic to the naked descent into hell, without which the Incarnation isn't complete. The circle of trinitarian love must expand all the way down and out, into the realm of its very negation.

Just as Light must penetrate the farthest reaches of darkness, Love must conquer hate, Life overcome death, and Truth sound the abyss of lies, "God, in the freedom of his love, makes the decision to descend kenotically all the way into the forsakenness of the world" -- a forsakenness that equates to a kind of auto-abandonment by God, of God, and in God.

People don't give it enough credit for being one of the more radical ideas imaginable.

"[T]he Spirit of Love cannot teach the Cross to the world in any other way than by disclosing the full depths of the guilt the world bears, a guilt that comes to light on the Cross, and is the only thing that makes the Cross intelligible."

I suppose what makes it intelligible is our guilt and God's love, the latter being sufficient to "cover" the former. We can't know just how guilty we are until we appreciate the death and God-forsakenness of the Cross. Nor without it can we begin to understand that from which we have been spared.

Again: wild idea.

We cannot leap over our own shadow (of guilt). Only God can do that. That we may be grafted onto this perfect circle is wilder still.

Yes, but at what price?

"Love desires no recompense other than to be loved in return; and thus God desires nothing in return for his love for us other than our love."

Love Alone is Credible. Incredible! Nothing short of it has sufficient explanatory power:

"Only a philosophy of freedom and love can account for our existence..."

This means that a true Christian must always be a lib- & lovertarian.

We've spoken before of how mere consciousness, or intelligence, or big brains, are insufficient to account for what is most remarkable about man -- that we are irreducibly intersubjectively open systems through which we find ourselves by giving ourselves away:

"One's consciousness, one's self-possession and possession of being, can grow only and precisely to the extent that one breaks out of being in and for oneself in the act of communication, in exchange, and in human and cosmic sympatheia."

This "circularity cannot be eliminated," for "it was conceived and set in motion by God alone..."

A footnote speaks of how, even in our bloodless and demythologized secular world, we can still perceive "the sheltering gaze that love casts upon being and essence," for example, revealing "the true nature of spousal love and the genuine love of children in the hearth of the triune fire of the family," not to mention "genuine friendship, and genuine love of country..."

Love does not come to man 'from the outside' because the human spirit is tied to the senses, but because love exists only between persons, a fact that every philosophy tends to forget. --Balthasar

Christianity: The Divine Comedy Club

In another book by Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, he suggests that "if God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, it's being wholly other."

On our end, he compares it to the ability to contemplate a great work of art. The person doing so "has to have a gift -- whether inborn or acquired through training -- to be able to perceive and assess its beauty, to distinguish it from mediocre art or kitsch." And there is a great deal of religious kitsch.

He then compares it to the mother-infant dyad (as discussed two posts back, only this is from a different book and makes a different point):

"After a mother has smiled at her child for many days and weeks, she finally receives her child's smile in response. She has awakened love in the heart of her child, and as the child awakens to love, it also awakens to knowledge: the initially empty-sense impressions gather meaningfully around the core of the Thou."

This is interesting, because it definitively links love and knowledge, and is our first hint that these transcendentals are unified at a higher level. I believe MotT talks about how love synthesizes while hatred disperses.

However, on a purely horizontal level it seems to me that hate unifies, which is why so many people -- especially on the left -- are addicted to it. For chronic haters, the only thing that gives them a sense of interior unity is the hated object (think too of the Islamic world, which is mainly unified by its Jew hatred).

Now, "God interprets himself to man as love in the same way [as the mother]: he radiates love, which kindles the light of love in the heart of man, and it is precisely this light that allows man to perceive this, the absolute Love." Remember the first time you smiled back to God? It seems to me that the spiritual life is a matter of amplifying this transpersonal resonance.

What did Eckhart say? Do you want to know what goes on in the core of the Trinity? I will tell you. In the core of the Trinity, the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.

In this space, "the primal foundation of being smiles at us as a mother and as a father." A "seed of love lies dormant within us as the image of God." However, "just as no child can be awakened to love without being loved, so too no human heart can come to an understanding of God without the free gift of his grace -- in the image of his Son."

I suppose this is why it is so important to reflect Christian love horizontally -- i.e., to love the neighbor, not just because it helps us, but because it helps others to experience God via the neighbor who is us.

The Christian Word can never be understood a as a mono-logue (like the Koran), but can only be experienced as dia-logoue. Therefore, "the book 'about' him must concern the transaction between him and the man he has encountered, addressed and redeemed in love."

That being the case, God must sometimes find himself asking, Is this thing on?

Oh, Grow Up

Not sure if this post goes anywhere. I'm still courageously laboring under this man flu. Nevertheless, let's continue with Balthasar's little sketch of human psycho-spiritual development.

It seems to me that Freud's idea of the latency period -- between four or five and puberty -- still holds water, in that after the turbulence of baby- and toddlerhood, the psychic tensions are diminished for a while -- or at least should be. For me, that period of time was magical.

My son is in the middle of it -- he's 10 -- and it seems like heaven on earth: "Nature and spirit are together in harmony." You got your buddies, you got sports, you're independent enough that you can run off by yourself to the park... What's not to like?

Sure, he hates school, but we don't put any pressure on him about that. I figure I don't remember anything from the fifth grade, so why should he? (And yet he gets good grades -- not to mention somehow winning the Person of Faith award every year. That surpasses even Bertie Wooster winning the prize for Scripture Knowledge while at Malvern House.)

But.

I think I see the shadow of a big But approaching in the distance. I don't like big Buts.

"Puberty brings a first questioning of this harmony. For the first time, the maturing person realizes his uniqueness as a person and thus experiences a loneliness hitherto unknown."

First of all, is this true? I never thought about it in exactly those terms, but it seems to be the case. I remember an intense longing, but I didn't really have any way to understand it. It was like, all of a sudden you are inhabited by a kind if psychic twin; it's not just you anymore, but this other being. We know ourselves "to be raised above the purely material," but what are we supposed to do about it?

So in that regard, the pattern is exactly like infancy, in which we are initially strangers to ourselves and only gradually individuate and find our center. In puberty it begins "with the discovery of [our] uniqueness, an as yet undefined dreamlike horizon of a meaningful whole that would correspond to [our] personhood..."

This certainly goes to Genesis, when Adam realizes he is alone and God furnishes a mate. That would have been nice.

But for us, "the first experiences of love" don't generally end well: "the thrilling side of the experience will at first cover up the contradiction that will, however, show all the more glaringly in the disillusionments that follow."

I remember that.

This is intriguing: "The disillusioned one feels himself betrayed not only by his partner but, on a deeper level, by his own nature."

In short, we confront the paradox that we want to "inscribe something permanent onto the surface of transitory material" (ibid.). This is obviously a spiritual longing, even the quintessence of it -- i.e., to infuse the finite with infinitude.

More generally, "Man wants to create something permanent, something above time, to make a definitive statement that would be the expression of his personal uniqueness."

Agreed. The problem is, on the one hand, if you confuse this with salvation; or, on the other, replace permanence with something less, e.g., fame or celebrity. I say, if you're not somehow dialoguing with eternity, you're just wrong. Nothing short of the timeless is really worth our time.

If Jesus is our archetypal man, perhaps we can learn a thing or two from his example: his mission "is not about detaching oneself from the transitory things in order to flee into some real or supposed eternity, but, conversely, about sowing the seed of eternity into the field of the world and letting the Kingdom of God spring up in this field."

(All quotes from Life Out of Death.)

And the Weird Became Flesh

Just a short post, because I have a cold...

As you know, I regard the neurologically immature human infant as the hinge of pneumacosmic evolution. Without the invention of the helpless human baby, there would have been no way to exit mere animality. Rather, we would be immersed in the senses and engulfed in the world, just like the other beasts.

For the longest time, I encountered no other writer who placed infancy in this cosmic context. So imagine my surprise when I found that Balthasar and Ratzinger -- maybe the two greatest theologians of the 20th century -- did the same.

For example, in this beautiful passage from Life Out of Death, Balthasar writes of how

The little child opens wide eyes at the world. What he sees -- forms, colors, sounds... -- he does not comprehend. The phenomena are neither familiar nor strange to him because he cannot yet apply them to himself. His self is not yet disclosed to him; whatever consciousness he possesses lies halfway between subject and object.

Now this is the true miracle among all these miracles of the beginning [by which I think he means that any kind of radical genesis is a miracle]: that one day the mother's smile is recognized by the child as a sign of his acceptance in the world and that the center of his own self is disclosed to him as he returns the smile. And because a You has found him, all the He that also surrounds him can be included in the relationship of familiarity (emphases mine, ellipsis in original).

The language is simple but the truth(s) it conveys could hardly be more profound. For this how God makes a human, one at a time, both today and in the past.

Mere Darwinism can't explain it, because a merely genetically complete Homo sapiens can never breach the walls of humanness in the absence of the Loving M(o)ther. So obviously, loving mothers and helpless babies had to co-arise; and given the time and energy it takes to care for a helpless infant, the father had to be there too.

Thus we have the image of concentric circles, with the baby at the center, surrounded by the mother, and with the father's protective arms encircling them. And of course, it couldn't have been accomplished without culture either, so you can add another circle. And there is no culture without cult, but that's getting a little far afield for our present purposes. Let's get back to the quote.

At first, the baby doesn't comprehend the world into which he has been thrown -- not just the exterior world, but the interior world which registers it. It is very much as if the world is all periphery and no center. Things just happen, with no continuity or point of reference. You might say that we "suffer" the world-sensations in a purely passive way. It's non-stop catastrophic novelty (which I think goes to grown-ups who retain an element of neophobia).

"Whatever consciousness he possesses lies halfway between subject and object." He's not yet a self, nor is there a stable or fully formed recognition of the other, so it's a strange world indeed. You would probably have to take LSD to simulate the experience of such radical novelty. No wonder babies cry!

I remember back in the day, reading a book on just this subject, i.e., taking LSD in order to regress to infancy and try to resolve one's issues. In the midst of a trip, people would draw their infanitle experiences. I wonder if I can find them online? Of course.

Ah. Here is birth:

Here's someone who seems to have had a bummer of a prenatal ride:

Anyway, the trippiest part of it all is how there is no I without a You. It's full of delightful orthoparadox, because the other You is really her own I, so becoming human is really an intimate mater of seeing things I to I. In the absence of that experience, we will remain at the periphery of ourselves, -- and of the world -- constantly persecuted by malevolent, unmetabolized experience.

In a certain way, human development -- i.e., individuation -- is always an ongrowing centration; not in the sense of being self-centered, because if things proceed the way they are supposed to, then the deepening of the self leads to a deepening of everything else, including one's ability to compassionately identify with others. The grandiose and brittle self-centeredness of an Obama would represent the pneumagraphic negative of what is supposed to happen in development.

Now, all of this has the most urgent religious connotations, because this whole situation reveals something essential about how God rolls. Yes, we are the image-and-likeness of God. But God is not a static thing!

Rather -- just for starters -- in God, the Father ceaselessly begets the Son, or gives birth to the Word. Thus, it ultimately explains how "finding God" and "being found by God" are the same thing (like finding mother and discovering oneself in the bargain).

In any event, the extremely weird situation revolving around the premature, neurologically incomplete and helpless baby turns out to be the only way I can think of to create a being in the image and likeness of an ec-centric Creator who is always lovingly giving away his own center.

The Cosmic Baby, blissfully floating before the fleeting flickering universe, stork naked in brahma daynight, worshiping in oneder in a weecosmic womb with a pew...:

The Vertical Church of the Live Grenade

Speaking of wounded Gods, I was thinking the other day of how mankind's blows to Jesus are like the last word in... jewjitsu, in that they ultimately miss him and instead redound upon the assailant. Ouch!

Actually, Balthasar says something similar in Heart of the World... which I can't find at the moment, but I see that there's a chapter called A Wound has Blossomed, so maybe this is just a roundabout way of getting there.

Ah. I see that it has a kind of double meaning. We wound Jesus out of the most wounded parts of our depraved selves, and somehow this backfires... in a good way: "Men wounded your Heart; water and blood flowed out. Men drank and became healthy; they washed themselves and became pure."

This goes even -- or perhaps especially -- for the man who murdered love. Which is all of us.

"Just as the first creation arose ever anew out of sheer nothingness, so, too, this second world... will have its sole origin in this wound, which is never to close again."

It's as if the church -- which is to say, the body of Christ -- is One Giant Wound.

In the margin, I wrote a note to myself: "He is the live grenade and the one who dives on it."

I just picked up Prayer, and there is this: the "'opening' to heaven which he is, is like a gaping rent going right through humanity, and the rent is the Church."

Which is sort of what I was driving at on page 252, where it says that the rend is now redeemable on your mirromortal garment.

If it makes no sense, don't worry, it's still perfect nonsense, for "it is as if God is not particularly interested in our attaining any kind of systematic grasp of his revelation."

Indeed, if we could completely comprehend it, it would be closer to Islam or Buddhism than to the Live Grenade (Islam explodes only dead ones).

By the way, God only supplies the grenade. We still have to pull the ring.

Referring back to what Balthasar says about God not being interested in a s. grasp of his r., another book of his helped motivate me to get back to blogging.

Recall that I was a tad frustrated over being unable to assemble it all into a Grand Synthesis, but think of the example of Jesus. Not only was there no Grand Synthesis, he didn't leave a single written word. Rather, he had the absolute faith to leave it to the Holy Spirit to take care of that. He doesn't even bother to try to be his own theologian.

"As for us, we try, for as long as we can, to finish our finite works ourselves; Jesus does not need to interpret the infinite work that he has begun and also completed and offer it in bite-sized pieces to the world; he can leave this to the divine Spirit for a perpetual interpretation. This is the ultimate Christian serenity" (emphasis mine).

"The only time Jesus wrote, he wrote on drifting dust.... Christ himself did not want, nor was he able, to manage the entirety of his work and suffering on earth with all its immanent meaning, but rather, handed it over to into the invisible hands of the Father."

So now I serenely type away and let God sort it out. To the extent that I have a mission -- even if just for myself -- submission must be prior to transmission. It's as if we can't give ourselves slack, but rather, can only surrender to it. And some disassembly is required, which is where the live grenade comes in.

Go ahead. Pull the ring. The wound only lasts forever.

"The Wounded God"

popped into my head this morning. Let's try to find out what why.

In the essay by Schuon cited yesterday, he defines Homo sapiens as the "being endowed with deiformity." As such, we are (at least in potential) a "total being" where all others are partial. We are capable of the imitation of Christ, as the old gag goes.

This being the case, the norms for humanness aren't given in the same way as for pigs, dogs, cows, and the rest of the animal kingdom. Their standards are "built in" and arrived at automatically.

As we've said before, no pig fails to become one (indeed, metaphysical evolutionists are helpless to explain why those damn fruit flies stubbornly continue to be fruit flies no matter how many thousands of generations in the laboratory). I suppose you could say that their telos is nonlocal but horizontal.

But man's archetype is nonlocal and vertical: it is for us to conform "to celestial norms," in a movement which in turn defines the "motion towards God" (ibid.).

As we've expressed it before, man is an eros shot directly into the heart of Celestial Central. In any event, "One cannot have homo sapiens without homo religiosus; there is no man without God" (ibid.).

Man qua man is in dialectic with the Divine Object, O (and with "human animality" below, if he chooses that route 666). And within this dialectic "the oneness of the object demands the totality of the subject" (ibid.), i.e., intellect, heart, and will.

Now, what this has to do with the Wound, I have no idea. Yet.

Let's stipulate that man is in dialectic with God. Nevertheless, man and God -- obviously -- are not equivalent terms. Rather, there is a senior partner who generates the whole isness. Thus we confront the orthoparadox that man "can only be himself through God" but "can never be God" (Balthasar). D'oh!

One reason why this is an orthoparadox is that we are called upon to (literally) do the impossible, precisely. I say "literally," for if we actually succeeded in "becoming God," this would be a kind of ultimate failure, since it would be delusional hubris. Nevertheless, we must try.

It very much reminds me of philosophy. The philo-sopher is a seeker of truth and lover of wisdom. The relationship is one of lover and beloved. The moment the relationship becomes one of possession, it's no longer philosophy. Usually it becomes some form of idolatry, whether, scientistic, religious, or religulous atheism.

So, theo-sophy would be a good name for the innerprize if it weren't tainted by other associations.

"No, I am not God; Yes, I need God as my beginning and my end" (Balthasar). But how are we supposed to imitate something or someone who is completely transcendent, immaterial, and unknowable?

"There was only one way out of this impasse, namely, that infinite, eternal Being should utter its own self in the form of a relative being" (ibid.).

So, man's "imitation of God" is predicated upon God's "imitation of man," so to speak.

Could this be where the wound gets in?

Yes, and in a variety of ways. For example, "anyone who encounters Christ is impelled either to worship him or to pick up stones with which to stone him" (ibid.). One way or another, somebody's gonna get hurt.

Indeed, at the ultimate extreme, "Christ's suffering, his God-forsakenness, his death and descent into hell is the revelation of a divine mystery, the language which God has chosen in order to render himself and his love intelligible to us" (ibid.).

Excuse me, but this is not the God I was expecting.

To be continued...

If You Don't Have a Question You Can't Have an Answer, and If You Don't Have a Wound You Can't be Healed

So, man is a perpetual question mark (?) before God.

What is he then in the absence of God? A question, yes, but a literally unanswerable one.

Then again, even posing -- or being -- the question implies something important, in that no other animal questions its existence. All other animals are "complete." They are answers without a question, while man is a question without answer.

There's a riddle for you: why would the most thoroughly complete animal be the most radically incomplete? The one must somehow imply the other in a roundabout way.

Perhaps the most compact way of saying it is that man is free; depending upon whether or not God exists, then freedom equates to the Good or Bad Infinity -- or, in existentialist terms, "being or nothingness." Each term is infinite, although it's the difference between a mountain peak and a swamp.

Schuon writes that "the purpose of our freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart."

It seems that there is no way to reduce this orthoparadoxical formulation to something more cutandry. We have a seed or spark at our center, "which, far from confining us, dilates us by offering us an inward space without limits and without shadows; and this center is in the last analysis the only one there is" (ibid.).

Ah. This would be the famous circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. In other words, God is the principle of centrality as such; without this principle, reality would be completely diffuse and disconnected, with no internal coherence.

Another way of saying it is that interior coherence is subjectivity as such. And all of this is related to the trinitarian structure of reality. It implies that man is, in a manner of speaking, God right here or over there. Both -- you and I -- are subjects of cosmic centrality, i.e., "in the image and likeness of Grand Central."

In a helpful (if we're lucky) essay called Overview of Anthropology, Schuon writes that human nature is distinguished from animal nature by virtue of being "made of centrality and totality, and hence objectivity..." Now he's thrown two more cosmic categories into the mix (totality and objectivity), but each must imply the other.

Centrality and totality are really two names for God -- or at least our (potential) conformity to him: they are "the capacity to conceive the Absolute" (i.e., God is every-where and every-thing).

And objectivity is "the capacity to step outside oneself," and therefore transcendence (although its opposite as well, i.e., sinking beneath oneself, not to mention various lateral iterations, i.e., false selves).

Without transcendence objectivity would be impossible, and without objectivity there is no intelligence deserving of the name.

Note that this objectivity takes three forms: there is 1) "objectivity of intelligence: the capacity to see things as they are in themselves..." 2) "objectivity of will, hence free will..."; and 3) "objectivity of sentiment," i.e., "the capacity for charity, disinterested love, compassion" (ibid.). Animals do not build hospitals.

As we know, man is composed of intellect, will, and sentiment; or truth, freedom, and virtue (or love). Animals are intelligent, but cannot be objective with it. It is doubtful that the most brainy animal can stand outside or above itself and regard itself as an object among objects.

And while animals obviously have will, it is not free; like animals, human beings can't help willing, but we can stand above (transcend) various options given by will and choose accordingly.

Finally, animals can love, after a fascion, but they have no way of knowing whether the loved object is worthy of it (e.g., Hitler's dog no doubt loved him).

I was just reading in MotT about how our various senses are like wounds. For example, thanks to a couple of holes in our heads, we are "pierced" by the light which allows us to see.

Now I'm thinking that the intellect, will, and sentiments alluded to above are equally wounds; and now that I think about it, they would have to be ontologically prior to our sensory wounds, i.e., sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing.

Let's start with the easiest: I mean, everyone knows that love is a wound, right? This is prefigured mythologically in the image of Cupid and his arrows.

And freedom is a wound, in the sense that it is "wide open." The existential anxiety produced by freedom is a consequence of the subjective experience of infinite choice; it's like having no skin, only on a transpersonal level (in the absence of God, our freedom is an unbound nightmare, a free fall into infinite space).

Finally, intelligence is definitely a wound, in the sense that, in order to know anything, we must first be open to the world. Think of the animal mind: it is not wounded in the same way ours is. They have the sensory wounds, but are untroubled by the higher injuries.

Much of this converges upon Jesus' most famous sermon -- you know, the one on the mount. In nearly every case, he talks about the necessity of the wound: blessed are the the poor in spirit, the meek, the persecuted, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, etc. Blessed are these gaping wounds, because without them we can't be healed.

Truth and Incarnotion

I say that -- "incarnotion" -- because I'm reading in Balthasar how Christian contemplation is really a kind of enfleshment of divine energies and ideas, thus, incarnotion. But mainly I say it because the title just popped into my head before I wrote the post, and it is merely up to me to write a post in conformity with the title so given.

In contemplation we are "an open ear to the ever-new word of God," wherein "God is speaking to this person and no other; to this beggar at the Temple gate..." "The whole glory" of this exchange -- and this is the key point -- is that "the very same personal encounter is meant to take place as in the Lord's earthly life."

I read somewhere words to the effect that it scarcely matters if Christ was incarnated in Nazareth or Bethlehem 2,000 years ago if he isn't incarnated in you. The Light must be onglowing. The Incarnation is always present tense. It is a perpetual possibility. Otherwise, what's the point?

It is the same vis-a-vis crucifixion and resurrection. I suppose it's really all a single movement of Incarnation-Crucifixion-Resurrection; which must in turn reflect an even deeper principle about the very nature of God. Which is what this weekend -- this Season -- is all about.

A "vast, living kingdom of heaven watches over transitory time..." For us this certainly includes the communion of saints and other worthies, i.e., those nonlocal operators standing by ready to assist us.

What do they see? Not bound by linear time or by various urgently trivial agendas, they "have an entirely different view of things; what seems important to us is utterly insignificant to them, and vice versa. What we are at pains to avoid can be the very thing which they see as significant, profitable and necessary..."

Oh great. Let this cup pass!

"Sorry. You don't know what's good for you."

Given that more tears are shed from answered than unanswered prayers, the corollary must be that more joy is spread from unanswered than answered ones. Not to say that the latter don't evoke joy, only to put things in their proper perspective.

Do people still try to "find themselves?" In the absence of God, there is simply no there there. "The man who concentrates on himself in the attempt to know himself better and thus, perhaps, to undertake some moral improvement, will certainly never encounter God..."

Conversely, "if he earnestly seeks God's will," then "he will -- incidentally, as it were -- realize and find himself (as far as he needs to)."

So, "finding oneself" is a byproduct of finding God -- which is really a tri-product of God finding us. In other words, the individual person is really a unique incarnotion, i.e., an Idea of God. Otherwise we'd all be the same, like animals and leftists.

Compare with the following quintessentially antichristic response to the definition of sin: Being out of alignment with my values.

This is helpful, for it explains why Obama regards political opponents as evil, for being out of alignment with his policies is a mortal sin.

Back to the God <--> Man complementarity which is brought to a cosmic pinnacle in the Incarnotion of the Godman.

If you think about it at all, you will be struck by the fact "that there should be something else apart from the 'all,' apart from the ocean of Being, a kind of 'non-all,' an 'almost nothing,' something that is not Being and yet somehow 'is,' something whose existence is not necessary but 'accidental'..."

What I'm driving at is this striking differentiation-in-unity and unity-in-differentation which reaches a climax in man, except that man can't bridge the chasm between the differentiation and the unity without effacing the one or the other, i.e., without ascending into a Vedantic nondualism or descending into a pantheistic monism.

I suppose only the incarnotion of Christ can bridge that abyss.

In conclusion, if man is (?) then God is (!). We get a sense of this truism whenever we experience a little spontaneous (?!).

The creature is a perpetual question addressed to God.... Fundamentally, God is the 'Other' in every possible way, and so he is the answer to the question which I am. --Balthasar

In My Womb

I think I'll try to do a short and concentrated post even when I don't have time to do a more sprawling and diffuse one. Like today.

As mentioned the other day, its seems that I feel better when I post than when I don't. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that communing with Ultimate Reality might be a "good way to start the day." Like planting good seed in the morning, or... I suppose it makes me feel like...

Petey, who was the fellow who said something about the point of life being to fire on all cylinders for something or other?

"I fancy the individual you have in mind, sir, is the philosopher Aristotle, who remarked that the Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue."

Yes, that's the one. I shall proceed to exercise the old faculties in c. with e. and v.

In any event, one way or another, this blogging business has become my primary Spiritual Practice, nor do I see it as something separate from prayer -- which is the subject and book under discussion. Mainly I pray for Light and the ability to reflect it, or pass it along to the Scattered Remnant.

Here, look at what Balthasar says: "The person who prays not only stands before truth and contemplates it objectively," but tries to live "in the truth" itself:

"Praying within the truth" means that we stand before "something pre-existing from time immemorial." This is what we are built for, as Aristotle says above: "Anything in us that runs counter to this is therefore merely a belated denial of what is our real truth, and hence nothing but a self-contradiction" (HvB).

Instead of horizontal intimacy with another person, it is vertical intimacy with the Metacosmic Person(s):

"Thus the union of the human being in grace and the Holy Spirit yields an ineffable fruit... in which it is impossible to say what comes from man and what comes from God. The 'fruits' of the Spirit in the receptive soul arise from the union of God's life with man's..."

These fruits, "once they have come to maturity, to our astonishment leave the 'womb'..."

Yes they do.

A dream. Last night. I'm explaining to someone that I'm trying to write a book. There's a huge wall before me -- like the Wall of Reality -- and I study parts of it with a monocle-like device, one part at a time. I explain that I'm trying somehow to assemble or synthesize the whole out of all the parts; or rather, waiting for the Spirit to show me how all the partial views through the monocle add up to the whole.

Am I wasting my timelessness?

"Intimacy with the Holy Spirit of truth... cancels out the spectator's uninvolved objectivity, with its external, critical attitude to the truth, and replaces it with an attitude which one can only describe as prayer."

So, is God telling me I don't have a prayer, or at least the right one?

"This prayer is total." It involves "our receiving and self-giving, our contemplating and our self-communication, in a single, undivided whole."

Reminds me of what our Unknown Friend says about how concentration without effort is putting unity into practice...

The Absolute Relative Absolute

Continuing with yesterday's discussion of faith as making a space for knowledge, Bion doesn't regard it (faith) as mere passive forgetting, but rather, "a positive act which restrains active memory and desire and provides a mental state which he represents by the term faith. It will allow him to approach the psychic reality that cannot be known but can 'be been'" (Grinberg, et al).

Analogously, as we've said before, God is not something known, but something undergone (or sophered). The only way to approach the I AM is via our own Be: I AM, therefore WE ARE. Balthasar: "To believe and to hear the word of God are one and the same thing."

"Bion uses the term faith, act of faith, and mystery in many of his papers to refer to a mental activity which operates in a non-sensuous dimension" (ibid.).

So, faith is the perfect way to know and understand nonsense; and God is the apex of the nonsense world (for spirit is immaterial). Without him we would be enclosed in an omniscient nightmare world of completely intelligible surfaces with no depth dimension, i.e., no mystery:

"For this voice from eternity whispers and breathes right through everything that exists in the world... and, without depriving the things of this world of their meaning and value, it lends them a bottomless dimension, exploding whatever is closed, relativizing whatever seems ultimate, revealing hidden depths in what seems simple..." (HvB, emphasis mine).

Woo hoo! A gnosis-all is never a know-it-all; nor is he a know-nothing, but rather, an unknow-everything.

Why are things This Way?

Evidently, the "divine plan" is "to lift the creature beyond himself and ennoble him..." (ibid.).

If that's not the plan, it's a hell of thing to happen in a random universe, i.e., a creature built to transcend itself. Why would such a being exist in a Darwinian world? Forget the order, information, and intelligence. How does the relentless transcendence get into the cosmos? How does perpetual being toward contaminate the pure being?

As far as I know, Christianity provides the only metaphysic that explains this mystery, for ultimate reality -- the Trinity -- is always and irreducibly a being-toward.

"In the Son, therefore, heaven is open to the world. He has opened the way from the one to the other and made exchange between the two possible..." (HvB). The Father "transcends" the Son, as the Son is Father-made-immanent. Immanence and transcendence are not a duality but a complementarity, the one always facing -- and nourishing -- the other.

Thus, "the One is accessible without our having to leave behind the many, the world..." The Son is "both ultimate and not ultimate. As God, he is absolute; and yet, as absolute, relative: as the Son who is a relationship proceeding from the Father and returning to him" (ibid.).

It's a Christian rac-koan: as Absolute, He is Relative; and as Relative, He is Absolute.

Furthermore, it's a single tripartite movement: "the sending of the Word of God (the Son) and the lending of the divine Spirit are only two phases of a single process in which divine truth and life are offered to man" (ibid.).

Moreover -- to return to the perfect nonsense -- "The withdrawal of the figure of the Son from sense-perception 'frees' the Spirit..." Only the Spirit "can cause the word of God to penetrate man, history, nature; only in the Spirit can man receive, contemplate and understand the word" (ibid.).

Mary's Yes to the Spirit "is the origin of all Christian contemplation"; like her, we must provide the ready -- which to say, empty -- womb in which to develop into fertile eggheads.

It is said that, 'Nature has a horror of emptiness.' The spiritual counter-truth here is that, 'the Spirit has a horror of fullness.' It is necessary to create a natural emptiness... in order for the spiritual to manifest itself. --Meditations on the Tarot

So, What Did You Learn From All that Education? O, Nothing

I just wanted to finish up my little review of the prolix pentalogy of Balthasar books I've recently read. As I mentioned in a comment, the resonant bits are a bit few and far between, but I shall endeavor to retrieve them anyway, because I have nothing better to do, and it seems that I feel better when I blog than when I don't.

Continuing with Prayer, Balthasar makes an exceedingly important point about faith, which is not analogous to credulousness or precritical thinking, but rather, "the ability to go beyond our own human intramundane and personal 'truth'...." It posits that 1) truth exists, and 2) that it is beyond us. That being the case, how else but in the reaching-beyond of faith can we contact it? Faith is the vertical bridge between finite and infinite.

Truly truly, it is a bridge to Owhere.

It's really not fundamentally different than, say, scientific faith. We've discussed this in the past, but scientific discoveries are not made through mere logic, otherwise reality would simply be an iteration of what we already know. Note too that the tiniest error at the beginning will be magnified exponentially the further you try to take it.

For example, Newtonian physics is quite accurate, accurate enough to get you through life. But if you try to use it to describe the entire cosmos, it's all wrong. At a certain point the anomalies become too obvious. Which is where Einstein stepped in in 1905. But even then, no matter how accurate quantum and relativity theories are, they cannot literally map reality without reminder. A model is not the thing itself. Except in climate science.

In any event, my point is that the scientist can't just extend an existing theory, but rather, has to wait in faith for reality to "speak" to him.

I might add that this is especially true of persons (and it turns out that reality is personal, as we'll get to later). There is no shortage of psychological theories, but not one of them actually describes, or can possibly describe, a real flesh and blood individual. In fact, by definition there can be no general theory of the individual, right?

This takes me way back to graduate school, and my discovery of the obscure psychoanalytic theorist W.R. Bion. He wrote of how, in the presence of a patient, the therapist must suspend memory, desire, and understanding, and enter a state of mind he called.... faith!

This attitude is so far from a medical model of the mind, that I immediately thought to myself, "how can you charge good money for systematically knowing nothing?" Frankly, I've never gotten past that question (imagine explaining it to an insurance adjuster). It's just a contingency of history that psychotherapy became medicalized -- for which reason it will always be full of pseudo-scientific quackery. Might as well try to medicalize religion (which is what Scientology effectively does).

For Bion, therapy "is a dynamic and lively interchange between two people who listen and talk to each other in a particular way, and not merely an intellectual and sophisticated adaptation between a 'psychoanalyst' and a 'patient'..." Therefore, "the therapist's fantasies of omnipotence, and this tendency to cling to theoretical a priori knowledge are the analyst's chief reactions in the face of something new and unknown that appears in every analytic session."

Think about that one: your job is to forget everything you think you learned in graduate school, and instead, simply be with this stranger, in the faith that Truth will eventually emerge in the space between you. The state of "not knowing" is not the same as mere ignorance; it is a state of active-passivity, or perhaps giving-receptiveness. It obviously combines male and female. It is allowing the space to become pregnant with truth, and eventually give birth to it. Let your will be done!

One reason you do this -- that is, "turn off" primary modes of knowing, is to "turn on" the more implicit ones. You might say that you have to disable the left brain in order to activate the right. Think of how one detects, say, anxiety.

Anxiety cannot be touched, or seen, or heard, or smelled. Or, let's just say "pain." How does one detect areas of psychic pain in an individual, especially when the individual is in denial about them? Often times the pain is "dispersed" in such a way that the therapist must be able to detect some small fragment of it and trace it back to a more primordial experience. Furthermore, the pain is dispersed in both space and time -- within the personality, and along the personal-historical timeline.

This is how I came up with the idea of O applied to God: I didn't just borrow it from Bion, rather, I stole it outright. For him, O is the unKnown reality between two persons in the analytic situation. I simply transposed it to the unKnown reality between two persons in the religious situation.

Faith is two things at once: an act and its object.... In more concrete terms, it is the grace which comes to us in God's self-giving and enables us to give ourselves to him in return. --HvB

Listening Past the Grooveyard

For some reason, I've been reading a lot of Balthasar lately. However, he is so windy and turgid that it just ended up adding to my ongoing bewilderment.

True, there are always scattered passages that speak directly to me, but these are punctuated by lengthy stretches in which he seems to be talking to himself. Thinking out loud. I want to say, "Okay, now review those last ten pages and condense it down to a sentence or two."

I remember Voegelin having the same problem. I suppose it's a Germanic thing. Schuon, who is the model of concision, spoke both German and French, but wrote all of his books in the latter, because he didn't think it possible to express them in German. If I recall correctly, he regarded French as the perfect vehicle for philosophical and metaphysical precision, whereas German was too... something. Maybe Twain was right: "Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp."

We're talking about five books, beginning with The Christian and Anxiety. Turns out it's not really about anxiety, but angst: according to the translator, "Although neither 'anxiety' nor 'anguish,' 'insecurity' nor 'fear' by itself fully captures the range of connotations of the German word, 'anxiety' and 'anguish' have generally been employed for direct translation of angst."

So, we need a term that combines anxiety, anguish, insecurity, fear, and angst. How about impending doom? Nameless dread? Lost in the cosmic bewilderness?

I shall now flip through the book and recall any highlighted passages that spoke to the Bob.

"Anxiety finds its ultimate meaning in the fact that the Word of God has taken it upon himself" (Yves Tourenne, from the foreword). So, Jesus doesn't just take on physical affliction but psychological affliction as well. The Word doesn't only become flesh; or flesh implies both soma and psyche. You could say that the Divine Slack became angst so that human angst might become slackful.

In any event, "God could not become man in any other way than by coming to know human fear and taking it upon himself" (HvB). But "human fear has been completely and definitively conquered by the Cross. Anxiety is one of the authorities, powers, and dominions over which the Lord triumphed on the Cross, and which he carried off captive and placed in chains" (ibid.).

So we got that going for us.

Next I read a book called Christian Meditation. The following makes perfect nonsense: "directions for meditating always begin by requiring us to create inner stillness and emptiness as a means of making room for what is to be received." In the form of pneumaticons, it means that we practice (o) and (---) in order to facilitate the descent of (↓).

When we "meditate on God," it is much more a case of God meditating on -- or in -- us: "We seem to be far from God, but he is near us. We need not work our way up to him.... God's plenitude is available without passing through antechambers. The way 'up to heaven' does not entail a long journey or descent 'down into the depths.'"

In short, God has already done the heavy lifting. Or rather, our ascending is just the back end of his descending, in one continuous spiraling movement.

A word from the Word is "like the point of a triangle on the ground that opens out upward into the infinite. His word is only the opportunity offered for ascending into this opening."

It reminds me of a diamond stylus in a record groove, which can generate as much as 35,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. In so doing, it -- so to speak -- throws out passages of timeless musical beauty. In the same way, via "borings vertically into the depths," the "vistas of God's word unfold to the meditating Christian..."

Next I read a book called Prayer, which covers a lot of the same ground as the above. Prayer is simply "a conversation between God and the soul..." It is a dialogue, for "there is no such thing as solitary speech," but rather, always an implicit Thou.

Thus, it seems that our listening is much more important than our speaking: "The essential thing is for us to hear God's word and discover from it how to respond to him.... God's word is the rope ladder thrown down to us so that we can climb up into the rescuing vessel."

This I like: "Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself." As such, no matter how much we know about ourselves, the unKnown -- or that known only by God -- is always greater.

This is one of the things that turned me from psychology to theology, metaphysics, and mysticism, in that the area described by psychology is so modest (and yet the field is so immodest in its claims).

The reason why the unknown always dwarfs the known is that our personal subject is ultimately rooted in the divine Subject. As we've said before, "He is, therefore I am" (or better, I AM, therefore we are). There is no other explanation. God "is in the 'I,' but he is also above it; since, as the absolute 'I,' he transcends it, he is in the human 'I' as its deepest ground, 'more inward to me than I am to myself.'"

And "scripture is not some systematic wisdom; it is an account of God's meeting with men" -- again, like the stylus in the groove. In contemplating it "we learn how to listen properly, and this listening is the original wellspring of all Christian life and prayer."

B'atman vs. Strawman

With 158 comments, I'd say it's about time to open a fresh thread, such that scattered members of the Cosmic Remnant may issue their impotent murmurs of protest against the tide of neobarbarism.

I still don't have any great compulsion to blog. Frankly, the mystery is what possessed me to march forth with it for ten years -- including every day for much of that span. For starters, how did I find the time? Oh, right. Didn't have to drive my son to school in the morning.

For the past three or four months, I've felt a bit like a shaken snow globe. I keep waiting for the particles to settle into a harmonious new metapattern, but maybe this is the new pattern. Or, perhaps writing is what helped settle the globe. After all, writing is one way to reduce chaos to order: to forge a little microcosmos ex nihilo.

But lately I've felt that the order is something of a sham. Whistling past the graveyard. Just-so stories for cosmic drifters. Verbal campfires that last for a night. Then again, that's what the blog was always about: wrestling with O in order to extract a warm little Nugget of Joy for the day.

Eh. Brainier birds than I have concluded that our most exalted scribbling is so much straw. As Aquinas might say, "get in line."

Until Further Gnosis

A spontaneous remission of blogorrhea. So yes, I do ever shut-up.

Hope: Natural and Supernatural

This is a post from five years ago BUT it converges on the previous two posts, as it has to do with appropriate and inappropriate forms of hope, i.e., hope as virtue and hope as developmental arrest. It has also been edited and tweaked here & there:

Pieper discusses the quite natural relationship between hope and youth, noting that the two are "ordered to one another in manifold ways."

This almost requires no explanation, and yet, is quite important -- and now that I think about it, undoubtedly helps to explain certain well known psycho-spiritual political pathologies of youth. For example, when the florid hope of youth is combined with its intrinsic lack of wisdom and experience, it produces... well, you name it. Obama is only their latest gift to the world.

Why anyone would place their hope in politics and politicians is quite beyond me; then again, I have only to think back to my own youth to realize that it's actually quite behind me. After all, my first vote was for Jimmy Carter, and in 1980 he was too conservative for me, so my preferred candidate was Barry Commoner of the illoustrious Citizens Party, a socialist front that mainly spread hysteria about nuclear power plants.

Pieper writes that merely natural hope "blossoms with the strength of youth and withers when youth withers." Again, no doubt true. This is obviously a sobering reality, but again, I think it explains why older people who should know better cling to the callow political enthusiasms of their youth. How else could a grown man be taken in by Obama's vacuous hopey-changey rhetoric?

It seems to me that one explanation might be the attempt to revive the kind of exciting hope for the future they once had as adolescents. As they say, when you see an old man with a young woman, it's not her youth he's after.

Likewise, when you see an old fart like Chris Matthews getting all tingly upon hearing his boyfriend speak, the real source of the excitement is not Obama's vague future but Matthews' own specific past. Thus, his recent disillusionment with Obama is just the other side of the prior auto-illusionment. He has awakened to his own projection, and yet, has learned nothing, since he now blames Obama for failing to uphold his beautiful illusion!

Being that politics is a substitute religion for the left, it is understandable that liberals would be prone to creating earthly messiahs. In reality, the entire process obviously took place in Matthews' own fat and spluttering head, that is, the illusion followed by the inevitable disillusion.

Now, the loss of natural hope brings with it the growth of what we might call "natural despair." This only makes sense. In the absence of any transnatural form of hope, it is simply an ironclad law of nature that when we are young the past is essentially irrelevant while the future is virtually unlimited. It is so full of potential that it can be mistaken for O, and can easily serve as a poor substitute.

But as we age, the past grows long while the future inevitably shrinks to nothing. How could one not be quite literally dis-illusioned? As Pieper describes it, the "not yet" of youth "is turned into the has-been," and we become a kind of bittersweet repository of "memories of what is 'no more.'"

Perhaps you have to be of my generation, but for me, there is nothing quite as pathetic as when pledge-drive time rolls around, and PBS disinters the usual decroded hippies to croon the same seedy songs they did 40 or 50 years ago, in the same way, hopefully kindling the same rancid emotions. As if hope is the same thing as embalming fluid.

Can you imagine having to sing something you wrote at the age of 20, while expressing the same emotions you felt then, with conviction? It is no wonder then that these people literally haven't taken a new political imprint since 1967. Ironic too that this desperate flight into the past is called "progressive."

This whole sad spectacle can be avoided with properly ordered hope. Pieper is at pains to emphasize that hope in and of itself is no kind of virtue. Rather, it only becomes a theological virtue when it converges upon its proper transnatural target.

Likewise, hopelessness and cynicism would be quite appropriate in a wholly materialistic worldview, for what is there to hope for aside from the grim maximization of an ever-dwindling pleasure while pretending death isn't right outside the door?

This very different type of transnatural hope is by no means tied to natural youth. However, consistent with Jesus' statements regarding the importance of holy childlikeness, this hope "bestows on mankind a 'not yet' that is entirely superior to and distinct from the failing strength of man's natural hope."

Looked at in this way, adolescents are more than a little hopeless before they gain real wisdom, and especially hopeless, or pathetic, if the condition persists well into adulthood, as it generally does in our tenured and media retardentsia.

Now interestingly, properly ordered (supernatural) hope has the effect of re-infusing, so to speak, natural hope, hence, the cheerful optimism of the Raccoon. We have discussed in the past how (↓) has a kind of "rejuvenating" effect, and how, for example, people literally feel "lighter" after attending a religious service.

Indeed, if I wake up feeling "heavy," I always feel lighter after a post, which is one of the reasons I persist in these verticalisthenics -- to keep the existential pounds off, so to speak. I would no more give up the habit than I would stop exercising.

Pieper writes of "the enchanting youthfulness of our great saints," for "nothing more eminently preserves and founds 'eternal youth' than the theological virtue of hope. It alone can bestow on man the certain possession of that aspiration that is at once relaxed and disciplined, that adaptability and readiness, that strong-hearted freshness, that resilient joy, that steady perseverance in trust that so distinguish the young and make them so lovable."

Which is why we may say with Pieper: God is younger than all else.

And why we may say with Petey: Too old, older than Abraham, too young, young as a babe's I AM. The circle unbroken by and by, a Divine child, a godsend, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' yes.

For in the end, hope is nothing more or less than a trusting and childlike Yes! to the Creator, and the faithful certainty that his creation is indeed good.

Seven Principles, Three Streams, One Love

Referring back to those first three cosmic principles discussed in yesterday's post, they are -- in case you didn't notice -- the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love respectively. Faith is vertical openness, for which we even have a handy symbol, (o).

The second, hope, reminds me of an analogue of God's own kenosis, whereby he empties himself of himself in order to be here below; you might say that we must likewise empty ourselves of ourselves in order to be with God above, in a kind of perpetual movement "toward a fulfillment that cannot be reached in bodily existence."

This is close enough to the symbol (---), which means the attainment of silence, peace, stillness, and tranquility, such that the absolute may be made manifest in us. We must maintain this tension in order for the divine energies to be rendered operative.

The third -- love -- is again in imitation of the Trinity. Love is simply the fact of eternal intersubjectivity, mutuality, self-offering, etc. It is distinction without separation; or better, distinction for the purposes of a higher and deeper union.

Moving on to the next four principles, these are, as you might have guessed, prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, AKA the cardinal virtues.

The first one is huge, and among other things, undoes the subjective turn initiated by Kant, whereby we are trapped in our own neurology and therefore barred access to reality.

Consider: prudence involves making decisions and rendering actions based upon reality revealing itself to us. Ever since Kant, revealing itself is precisely what reality cannot do; thus the provenance of "perception is reality," which represents the precise inversion of prudence.

Yes, I am being slightly unfair to Kant, who would have been horrified at what people ended up doing with his ideas. Nevertheless, once you make that fatal choice -- of beginning with the subject instead of objects -- there is no stopping the eventual reductio ad absurdum of the tenured. As Pieper says, "Man's life is authentic only when he does not allow his vision of reality to be clouded by the yes or no of his own desire."

In short, when it comes to prudent thought and action, we must say Yes to the It Is, No to the I Wish. Note, for example, how most all of the troubles caused by our first postmodern president are due to his imprudent devotion to the I Wish of ideology. Simple as.

Although there are allied catastrophes, most notably, the gnostic cancellation of #2 above, i.e., collapsing the vertical space in order to force heaven upon us now. Ironically, this is what Obama calls hope, which is none other than the abandonment of proper theological hope oriented toward its nonlocal vertical object. Doing so is audacious. I'll give him that.

Speaking of the left, just as liberal hope represents the abandonment of (and by!) real hope, "social justice" involves the negation of our fifth principle, justice. Justice means "the art of living with others in such a way that [one] gives to each what is rightfully his."

Conversely, social justice means deploying the violence of the state to take what is rightfully ours in order to "spread it around" in a way that satisfies third parties. But theft is still theft.

Social Justice also involves the violence of the mob -- as in Ferguson or Baltimore -- to undermine the Is in the name of some mythic Wish. Likewise, there is no War on Women -- although there is surely a war on womanhood by the the left in general and feminists in particular, which represents another rejection of the cosmic Is.

Real justice requires courage, and it takes no courage to be a Social Justice Warrior raiding the public treasury. Is it courageous for Obama to have run up another 10 trillion dollars in debt in order to gift his constituents with other people's money? Yes, as courageous as it is for water to flow downhill.

In reality, it would require courage not to have done this (remember what was said above about saying Yes to Isness and No to Wishes). In contrast, the prudent man "knows that it is necessary to put himself on the line in order to realize the good in this world. He is ready -- with courage -- to accept loss and injuries for the sake of truth and justice."

Our seventh cosmic principle is temperance, "or self-discipline that protects [man] from the self-destruction of pleasure seeking." In a way, we come back to that cosmic turn to the subject and all it implies, for the last word in pleasure must involve being one's own god. In a stroke, this collapses the vertical space, places one in a loveless, narcissistic void, and authorizes desire as the law of the soul.

The very next chapter is another extremely compact one -- little more than half a page -- called Three Streams of Life. Let's see if it can put the finishing touches on what was said above. (I haven't read it yet, but I have a feeling it will be relevant, since all Principles must interact.)

Before we begin, note that around here we often speak of two streams of life, and by extension, a third, that is, (↓), (↑), and their prolongation into the horizontal world, (→).

"The supernatural life in man," observes Pieper, "has three main currents." The first is "the reality of God," which "manifests itself to faith."

In other words, faith -- which is a supernatural inclination or preconceptual readiness to reach out to our nonlocal source -- is already evidence of its object. Just as we wouldn't have eyes were it not for the existence of light, we wouldn't have faith were it not for the supernatural light detected and gathered by faith.

The second stream -- love -- is the affirmation of "the Highest Good, which has become visible beneath the veil of faith." If the paragraph above is (↓), why then this must be (↑).

The third stream is hope, which I would say must have to do with the eventual fulfillment of (↓↑), i.e,, "comprehensive sharing of the triune life of God." But we already take a share in this via (→), do we not, for what is terrestrial love but another icon of the Trinity and the Life therein?

(All quoted material from An Anthology by Josef Pieper.)

See More with Celestial Principles

When it feels as if there is nothing left to say, it is helpful to revert to first principles. This is like venturing back upstream to the source of thought, whereas down in the lowlands things can appear rather soggy and saturated. But at the source, the water is always fresh and invigorating.

Especially in this day and age, in which there is much more information than anyone could ever assimilate, we need simple principles to organize and reduce it to order and hierarchy (which amount to the same thing), but without distorting or occluding the facts on the ground. With our principles in place, we can see more, not less.

Schuon makes this point in a number of his books. For example, he writes that "Assuredly there are no such things as 'problems of our time' in the philosophers' sense of the expression."

In other words, "there is no thought that one could describe as 'new' in its very foundation," even if there are questions that "belong to our time" -- such as the relationship between science and faith, which wasn't really problematic prior to the so-called scientific revolution.

And yet, the question isn't truly new, and there exist "ancient principles" (for example in Aristotle) that are still as useful as ever in addressing it. Certainly neo-Aristotelian philosophy of science will carry you much further into reality than vulgar scientism or metaphysical Darwinism.

Here is the exact passage I was looking for, in To Have a Center: "There is the order of principles, which is immutable, and the order of information -- traditional or otherwise -- of which one can say that it is inexhaustible."

What I would say is that the expert is entitled to his inexhaustible information, while every man, as man, is entitled to the cosmic principles that render his life intelligible, meaningful, and fulfilling.

And this is the function of religion, not just to assure the latter three, but prior to that, to render the principles -- often in implicate, or symbolic, or mythic terms -- available to every man at every time.

God decidedly does not limit his wisdom to philosophers, intellectuals, and the tenured. Rather, it is equally available in principle to everyone, while addressed to the level they are at -- which is probably what offends the narcissism of the philosophers, intellectuals, and tenured.

Note the title of the book: To Have a Center. This center -- we call it Celestial Central, or Upper Tonga -- is the home of the Principles, or the Principles' Orifice, AKA O.

At the same time, embracing the Principles will help to "centralize" yʘu. These principles, since they are higher up in the cosmic food chain, illuminate what is below; for example, as God illuminates man, man illuminates the animal world. That the reverse is also true is only because of the first principle; in other words, man couldn't illuminate God unless God first illuminated man. As above, so below.

In another book, Schuon says that "To speak of religion is to speak of a meeting between the celestial and the terrestrial, the divine and the human" -- or the Absolute and Relative, the One and Many, the Eternal and Temporal, the Wave and Particle, etc. Speaking of Principles, one of ours is Complementarity, such that "To know what man is, is to know what God is, and conversely" (Schuon)

In a manner of speaking, of course. The principles do not precisely map the territory: "there is of necessity a gap between the expression and the thing expressed, hence between doctrine and reality." It is easy enough for the bonehead atheist to criticize religion, but "no doctrine can be identical to what it intends to express," and in the case of religion, we are trying to express the inexpressible (or translingual).

The point is not to drag religion down from the peaks to the plains and then understand the higher in terms of the lower. Anyone can do that! Rather, the principles under discussion "furnish a coherent scheme of points of reference more or less elliptical by definition but in any case sufficient to lead mental perception towards a given aspect of the real."

Or, just imagine, say, a three dimensional reality transformed into two. Each point on the plane will refer to a point in the higher space. This certainly goes to the problem of biblical literalism, which likewise reduces the higher dimensions to the lower.

So anyway, one of our favorite foundational texts is Josef Pieper's Anthology. Pieper is already as concise and economical as can be, and this anthology boils him down even further to the essence of the essence, or one might say the Principles of the principles.

For example, there is a chapter called Seven Statements, one page in length. It begins with the claim that "The wisdom of the West expresses the sum total of what man 'ought to' do in seven sentences."

Really? All wisdom reduced to seven sentences? That's what I'm talkin' about!, i.e., rendering this baffling world intelligible.

First: "Man, insofar as he realizes his meaning... opens himself by listening to God's word wherever he can perceive it."

This can be reduced even further by simply affirming that man is an open system on the vertical plane -- just as he is an open system on the level of physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, and everything else.

And in fact, these latter openings are only possible because of the first; they are all ultimately shadows of the Trinity, which is openness and relation as such.

Second -- and this is a biggie -- "Man is true to himself only when he is stretching forth... toward a fulfillment that cannot be reached in his bodily existence."

Or in other words, do not be tempted to collapse the vertical space between man and God, for this is where Real Life takes place. Both of my quotes in the comment box go directly to this principle, that man is always between, such that he cannot eliminate the betweenness without abolishing himself.

Third (and I am condensing): man "finds it good that God, the world and himself exist." Note that this is not a feeling but a principle. To understand it is to stand most of our usual concerns on their heads.

For example, while the existence of evil is a problem, an even more mysterious problem is the existence of good! In fact, evil is parasitic on the good, and we can only even recognize it because of our implicit awareness of the good. This same principle accounts for the beauty, rationality, and intelligibility of the world.

To be continued...