The Truth About Double Truth

The theory of "double truth," according to Prof. Wiki, is 

the view that religion and philosophy, as separate sources of knowledge, might arrive at contradictory truths without detriment to either.

This has always been rejected by the Church, and Thomas Aquinas in particular built a pretty nice career out of the contrary idea that truth is one, irrespective of our opinions about it.  

Now -- spoiler alert -- not only is truth one, but every thinking person understands this, whether explicitly or, more often, implicitly. 

For the act of thinking presupposes the unity of reality, of intelligence and intelligibility. After all, if reality isn't intelligible to intelligence, then we're done here: truth is reduced to opinion, and man can only forever marinate in his own stupidity, like an endless loop of CNN. 

Our friend Nicolas observes that

Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about the truth.

Come to think of it, the act of thinking presupposes a number of things, and let us count the ways. 

Better yet, let's consider science, since it is believed by many to be synonymous with reason itself, and very much opposed to any so-called "truth" of religion. Indeed, scientism is the doctrine of Single Truth, period. All truth is scientific truth. And that's the truth!

Yes, it's too easy to point out that this epistemological assertion isn't subject to scientific proof, but we'll let that pass for the moment. Suffice it to say that science cannot prove that science is the only path to truth, any more than the Bible proves the Bible is infallibly true because it is infallible. 

Let's say we want to do us some science. What are the conditions that must be present in order for science to be possible? First of all, there must be an order in things, an order we do not invent but discover. On the one hand, these things are external to us, and yet, we are able to decode a hidden order via our own interiority. 

As mentioned a few posts back, the word "intellect" means read within, and this is indeed what the scientist does when, for example, he discovers the invisible laws that govern the material world. The weirdness of this ability is insufficiently appreciated, but certainly no mere animal can access this immaterial world of laws, causes, and principles. Only an immaterial being could do this.

What kind of immaterial being? A person. 

Now, we just finished a series of posts exploring the idea that person is the ultimate principle of the cosmos. I probably didn't convince anyone who doesn't already believe it, and besides, the deluded are prolix, so I probably should have just rested on the authority of the Aphorist:

Truth is a person.

However, terse as he is, he makes some other key points about truth, for example, 

In order for a multitude of diverse terms to coexist, it is necessary to place them on different levels. A hierarchical ordering is the only one that neither expels nor suppresses them.

This is helpful, because it allows us to see that what may look like a double truth is merely a result of putting these truths out of order, such that the lower truth may eclipse the higher. For example, the truth of scientism results in a total eclipse of God. But does the truth of God eclipse science? Not even remotely. 

Rather, the truth of science is a direct consequence of the truth of God, which is to say, Truth. For Aquinas, 

The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light...

Which means that there is and must be something in humans that, despite the fact that we are created, nevertheless participates in the uncreated; although we are obviously contingent -- we exist, but our existence is unnecessary -- even in knowing this, we know a necessary truth; and as Aquinas says, "Everything eternal is necessary." 

Therefore, if I'm following my argument, I just now participated in eternity, because the converse must be equally true -- that everything necessary is eternal.

Which is precisely what Eckhart says about the intellect, and so too does Schuon -- that at least some part of it must not only be uncreated but uncreatable, to the extent that it knows the necessary:

geometrically speaking, the Intellect is a ray rather than a circle, it “emanates” from God rather than “reflecting” Him. 

Or only reflecting him. More specifically, we may distinguish  

a "created Intellect" and an "uncreated Intellect," the latter being the divine Light and the former the reflection of this Light at the center of Existence; "essentially," they are One, but "existentially," they are distinct.

And now that I'm thinking about it, it seems to me that the unfortunate events of Genesis 3 must involve a serious rupture in this prior unity, while the Incarnation must entail its reunification and healing via the metacosmic Person -- and our participation in Him.

So, I woke up two hours early this morning and decided to stay up. Big. Mistake. Without the usual nine hour coma, I'm feeling pretty fuzzy, so I never did get to the main event. To be continued... 

The Truth About Double Truth

The theory of "double truth," according to Prof. Wiki, is 

the view that religion and philosophy, as separate sources of knowledge, might arrive at contradictory truths without detriment to either.

This has always been rejected by the Church, and Thomas Aquinas in particular built a pretty nice career out of the contrary idea that truth is one, irrespective of our opinions about it.  

Now -- spoiler alert -- not only is truth one, but every thinking person understands this, whether explicitly or, more often, implicitly. 

For the act of thinking presupposes the unity of reality, of intelligence and intelligibility. After all, if reality isn't intelligible to intelligence, then we're done here: truth is reduced to opinion, and man can only forever marinate in his own stupidity, like an endless loop of CNN. 

Our friend Nicolas observes that

Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about the truth.

Come to think of it, the act of thinking presupposes a number of things, and let us count the ways. 

Better yet, let's consider science, since it is believed by many to be synonymous with reason itself, and very much opposed to any so-called "truth" of religion. Indeed, scientism is the doctrine of Single Truth, period. All truth is scientific truth. And that's the truth!

Yes, it's too easy to point out that this epistemological assertion isn't subject to scientific proof, but we'll let that pass for the moment. Suffice it to say that science cannot prove that science is the only path to truth, any more than the Bible proves the Bible is infallibly true because it is infallible. 

Let's say we want to do us some science. What are the conditions that must be present in order for science to be possible? First of all, there must be an order in things, an order we do not invent but discover. On the one hand, these things are external to us, and yet, we are able to decode a hidden order via our own interiority. 

As mentioned a few posts back, the word "intellect" means read within, and this is indeed what the scientist does when, for example, he discovers the invisible laws that govern the material world. The weirdness of this ability is insufficiently appreciated, but certainly no mere animal can access this immaterial world of laws, causes, and principles. Only an immaterial being could do this.

What kind of immaterial being? A person. 

Now, we just finished a series of posts exploring the idea that person is the ultimate principle of the cosmos. I probably didn't convince anyone who doesn't already believe it, and besides, the deluded are prolix, so I probably should have just rested on the authority of the Aphorist:

Truth is a person.

However, terse as he is, he makes some other key points about truth, for example, 

In order for a multitude of diverse terms to coexist, it is necessary to place them on different levels. A hierarchical ordering is the only one that neither expels nor suppresses them.

This is helpful, because it allows us to see that what may look like a double truth is merely a result of putting these truths out of order, such that the lower truth may eclipse the higher. For example, the truth of scientism results in a total eclipse of God. But does the truth of God eclipse science? Not even remotely. 

Rather, the truth of science is a direct consequence of the truth of God, which is to say, Truth. For Aquinas, 

The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light...

Which means that there is and must be something in humans that, despite the fact that we are created, nevertheless participates in the uncreated; although we are obviously contingent -- we exist, but our existence is unnecessary -- even in knowing this, we know a necessary truth; and as Aquinas says, "Everything eternal is necessary." 

Therefore, if I'm following my argument, I just now participated in eternity, because the converse must be equally true -- that everything necessary is eternal.

Which is precisely what Eckhart says about the intellect, and so too does Schuon -- that at least some part of it must not only be uncreated but uncreatable, to the extent that it knows the necessary:

geometrically speaking, the Intellect is a ray rather than a circle, it “emanates” from God rather than “reflecting” Him. 

Or only reflecting him. More specifically, we may distinguish  

a "created Intellect" and an "uncreated Intellect," the latter being the divine Light and the former the reflection of this Light at the center of Existence; "essentially," they are One, but "existentially," they are distinct.

And now that I'm thinking about it, it seems to me that the unfortunate events of Genesis 3 must involve a serious rupture in this prior unity, while the Incarnation must entail its reunification and healing via the metacosmic Person -- and our participation in Him.

So, I woke up two hours early this morning and decided to stay up. Big. Mistake. Without the usual nine hour coma, I'm feeling pretty fuzzy, so I never did get to the main event. To be continued... 

Losing & Finding, Dying & Living

We're nearing the end of Person and Being, which, as I mentioned at the outset, is one of my favorite little books. Indeed, I wish all books were simultaneously this compact and substantive. The world would be a much better and more coherent place without so much writing. 

Fake News is only a symptom of a much deeper pneumopathology. Toss higher indoctrination into the mix, and we have millions of credentialed retards who think their low-watt words matter to anyone outside their immediate family. 

If you really have something important to say, it shouldn't take that long to say it. So, what's the motivation? I suppose the same instinct that moves dogs to pee on fire hydrants, only worse, since animals have no free will; linguistic narcissism is a choice.

For it is written -- and even then just barely --

Writing is many times unavoidable; publishing is almost always indecent.

Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.

The deluded are prolix.

The fewer adjectives we waste, the more difficult it is to lie.

Clarity eliminates rhetoric.

Write concisely, so as to finish before making the reader sick. 

Simple talent is to literature what good intentions are to conduct. 

Matter of fact, in the very next section Clarke describes what can go wrong if our movement toward self-transcendence is stymied or derailed: such individuals stagnate while wondering 

what is wrong with them now that the old ways of self-fulfillment no longer seem to work as effectively as before; they become restless, wander on the horizontal level looking for new challenges, new stimuli that will fill the mysterious void they feel developing, but avoiding the shift to a new self-transcending level of consciousness....

"Others more or less consciously and deliberately cling tenaciously to their self-centered ego," and thus

positively block the flow of the Transcendent Center in them and through them, with the final consequence of stagnation or perhaps even disintegration...

Schuon describes in similar terms how our subjectivity may become hardened and frozen -- as if under a thick sheet of ice -- or dispersed and dissipated in outwardness. 

But in reality, we are endowed with

a radical innate drive toward the whole of being, the unlimited horizon of being as intelligible. 

Therefore, 

since the Source and fullness of all being is Infinite Being, there is in every spiritual intellect a natural drive to know God as Source, fullness of being, and final goal of knowing... a natural drive in us as images of God to transcend our own limited point of view...

Let's stipulate that this drive is either present in us or it's not; and that it either has a proper telos or it is utterly inexplicable and devoid of meaning. 

I'm just now reading another book called A Catholic Scientist Harmonizes Science and Faith, and the author makes the same point:

Our universal drive for self-transcendence does not seem to come from our genes.... As St. Bonaventure put it, "We cannot rise above ourselves unless a higher power lifts us up."

To say that we are images of God is to acknowledge a key principle, for it explains how it is possible to "de-center and transcend our finite selves," and thus "take on the Infinite Center, the authentic Center of all being, as our own center and perspective." Only in so doing are we able to fulfill "the potentialities of personal being as such."

This is at once "a losing or letting go of oneself that is simultaneously and by that very fact a new finding of oneself at a deeper level."

Only by reaching beyond the human can we succeed in becoming fully human. To refuse to do so condemns us to fall short of the human itself. To be a human person fully means to self-transcend toward the Infinite. 

Like Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it or something. 

Losing & Finding, Dying & Living

We're nearing the end of Person and Being, which, as I mentioned at the outset, is one of my favorite little books. Indeed, I wish all books were simultaneously this compact and substantive. The world would be a much better and more coherent place without so much writing. 

Fake News is only a symptom of a much deeper pneumopathology. Toss higher indoctrination into the mix, and we have millions of credentialed retards who think their low-watt words matter to anyone outside their immediate family. 

If you really have something important to say, it shouldn't take that long to say it. So, what's the motivation? I suppose the same instinct that moves dogs to pee on fire hydrants, only worse, since animals have no free will; linguistic narcissism is a choice.

For it is written -- and even then just barely --

Writing is many times unavoidable; publishing is almost always indecent.

Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.

The deluded are prolix.

The fewer adjectives we waste, the more difficult it is to lie.

Clarity eliminates rhetoric.

Write concisely, so as to finish before making the reader sick. 

Simple talent is to literature what good intentions are to conduct. 

Matter of fact, in the very next section Clarke describes what can go wrong if our movement toward self-transcendence is stymied or derailed: such individuals stagnate while wondering 

what is wrong with them now that the old ways of self-fulfillment no longer seem to work as effectively as before; they become restless, wander on the horizontal level looking for new challenges, new stimuli that will fill the mysterious void they feel developing, but avoiding the shift to a new self-transcending level of consciousness....

"Others more or less consciously and deliberately cling tenaciously to their self-centered ego," and thus

positively block the flow of the Transcendent Center in them and through them, with the final consequence of stagnation or perhaps even disintegration...

Schuon describes in similar terms how our subjectivity may become hardened and frozen -- as if under a thick sheet of ice -- or dispersed and dissipated in outwardness. 

But in reality, we are endowed with

a radical innate drive toward the whole of being, the unlimited horizon of being as intelligible. 

Therefore, 

since the Source and fullness of all being is Infinite Being, there is in every spiritual intellect a natural drive to know God as Source, fullness of being, and final goal of knowing... a natural drive in us as images of God to transcend our own limited point of view...

Let's stipulate that this drive is either present in us or it's not; and that it either has a proper telos or it is utterly inexplicable and devoid of meaning. 

I'm just now reading another book called A Catholic Scientist Harmonizes Science and Faith, and the author makes the same point:

Our universal drive for self-transcendence does not seem to come from our genes.... As St. Bonaventure put it, "We cannot rise above ourselves unless a higher power lifts us up."

To say that we are images of God is to acknowledge a key principle, for it explains how it is possible to "de-center and transcend our finite selves," and thus "take on the Infinite Center, the authentic Center of all being, as our own center and perspective." Only in so doing are we able to fulfill "the potentialities of personal being as such."

This is at once "a losing or letting go of oneself that is simultaneously and by that very fact a new finding of oneself at a deeper level."

Only by reaching beyond the human can we succeed in becoming fully human. To refuse to do so condemns us to fall short of the human itself. To be a human person fully means to self-transcend toward the Infinite. 

Like Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it or something. 

Volunteers Needed for Cosmic Mission

With everything we've said about persons + cosmos over the past couple of weeks, where does it leave us? It leaves us with -- or in -- 

a great double "movement" in the universe of actual being from the Source outward toward creation and from creation back towards its Source (Clarke).

So, a circle or spiral, and not just a moving line or static point? Precisely:

St. Thomas calls this the great circle of being, the exodus of the Many to the One. Being is always intrinsically "on the move," it seems, both within and without God.  

Sounds about right to me: movin' on up to Celestial Central. Or not, for we are always free, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it: O or Ø. 

To turn from the latter to the former is metanoia, our ontological reset, or reOrientation: 

Once our turning toward the Source, the Great Center, has become fully conscious and freely chosen, so that we take it explicitly now as the Center of our own lives in vertical self-transcendence..., then at this point the natural process of self-development of the person undergoes a kind of reversal.

If you're looking for the reset button, it's between and slightly above your eyes; or possibly to the right of the heart in older models. Either way,

as we move more and more into the phase of vertical self-transcendence, putting off our self-centered consciousness to open up to the Great Center and its transforming power, then a profound reversal in the movement of self-development takes place.

Any evolution requires an open system and a form of exchange, whether of matter, energy, or information. This one conveniently involves all three, in the form of various graces, charisms, and sacraments. This power, in whatever form, "now flows primarily from above downwards, transforming us from above."

Nor are we alone in our weirdness, for something similar is "taught in all the great spiritual traditions," boy and how. In the Book of the Same Name I just called it (↑) and (↓), but these are abstractions that require concrete practice in order to "activate," so to speak -- otherwise they're like math with no matter, or essence with no form. God does 90% of the work if we only meet him halfway.

I guess what I'm saying is that this is always happening anyway, so we might as well be aware of, and participate in, it. Grace falls like rain, and we are free to ignore or be conscious of it:

many [people] slip quietly into it, I suspect, than are self-consciously aware of it. It is a phase in the journey toward full self-development as a person that usually emerges somewhere toward mid-life...

Although sometimes before mid-life if you happen to be extra-weird. It takes all kinds to make a world, and there are apparently "born pneumatics" who, in the words of Schuon, are "born with a state of knowledge which, for other people, would actually be the goal, and not the point of departure." 

This is no different from the person who comes into the world with a gift for sports or music or language or math. Everybody's good at something, although it is important to place it in a trinitarian context, otherwise we may easily become the dupes of our own gift. That way lies cosmic narcissism instead of vertical openness to the grace, i.e., the source of the gift.

Apparently, we have to give it away like a hot potato, or so my sources are telling me: once our 

sense of self and what we can do is securely established, somewhere around the mid-point of our life's journey, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, a kind of call comes to us from our depths -- or beyond -- sometimes clear, more often obscure.

Supposing we take the call,

We come to realize that our self-development cannot go on to full term if we continue living the same way. To move on further some radical shift of focus must take place.

This is none other than

the call to radical self-transcendence, to let go of our own selves as center of interest and take on the Great Center as our own new center of consciousness and open ourselves to let its life flow through us and express itself more fully in our lives.

In so doing, the vertical becomes horizontal, or incarnates in our lives, so to speak:

And now our self-communication to others becomes, mysteriously, more and more of a God-communication through us. 

Look, someone's gotta do it. Why not you?

Volunteers Needed for Cosmic Mission

With everything we've said about persons + cosmos over the past couple of weeks, where does it leave us? It leaves us with -- or in -- 

a great double "movement" in the universe of actual being from the Source outward toward creation and from creation back towards its Source (Clarke).

So, a circle or spiral, and not just a moving line or static point? Precisely:

St. Thomas calls this the great circle of being, the exodus of the Many to the One. Being is always intrinsically "on the move," it seems, both within and without God.  

Sounds about right to me: movin' on up to Celestial Central. Or not, for we are always free, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it: O or Ø. 

To turn from the latter to the former is metanoia, our ontological reset, or reOrientation: 

Once our turning toward the Source, the Great Center, has become fully conscious and freely chosen, so that we take it explicitly now as the Center of our own lives in vertical self-transcendence..., then at this point the natural process of self-development of the person undergoes a kind of reversal.

If you're looking for the reset button, it's between and slightly above your eyes; or possibly to the right of the heart in older models. Either way,

as we move more and more into the phase of vertical self-transcendence, putting off our self-centered consciousness to open up to the Great Center and its transforming power, then a profound reversal in the movement of self-development takes place.

Any evolution requires an open system and a form of exchange, whether of matter, energy, or information. This one conveniently involves all three, in the form of various graces, charisms, and sacraments. This power, in whatever form, "now flows primarily from above downwards, transforming us from above."

Nor are we alone in our weirdness, for something similar is "taught in all the great spiritual traditions," boy and how. In the Book of the Same Name I just called it (↑) and (↓), but these are abstractions that require concrete practice in order to "activate," so to speak -- otherwise they're like math with no matter, or essence with no form. God does 90% of the work if we only meet him halfway.

I guess what I'm saying is that this is always happening anyway, so we might as well be aware of, and participate in, it. Grace falls like rain, and we are free to ignore or be conscious of it:

many [people] slip quietly into it, I suspect, than are self-consciously aware of it. It is a phase in the journey toward full self-development as a person that usually emerges somewhere toward mid-life...

Although sometimes before mid-life if you happen to be extra-weird. It takes all kinds to make a world, and there are apparently "born pneumatics" who, in the words of Schuon, are "born with a state of knowledge which, for other people, would actually be the goal, and not the point of departure." 

This is no different from the person who comes into the world with a gift for sports or music or language or math. Everybody's good at something, although it is important to place it in a trinitarian context, otherwise we may easily become the dupes of our own gift. That way lies cosmic narcissism instead of vertical openness to the grace, i.e., the source of the gift.

Apparently, we have to give it away like a hot potato, or so my sources are telling me: once our 

sense of self and what we can do is securely established, somewhere around the mid-point of our life's journey, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, a kind of call comes to us from our depths -- or beyond -- sometimes clear, more often obscure.

Supposing we take the call,

We come to realize that our self-development cannot go on to full term if we continue living the same way. To move on further some radical shift of focus must take place.

This is none other than

the call to radical self-transcendence, to let go of our own selves as center of interest and take on the Great Center as our own new center of consciousness and open ourselves to let its life flow through us and express itself more fully in our lives.

In so doing, the vertical becomes horizontal, or incarnates in our lives, so to speak:

And now our self-communication to others becomes, mysteriously, more and more of a God-communication through us. 

Look, someone's gotta do it. Why not you?

The Structure of Metascientific Revelations

Okay, the question comes down to, are persons just accidents, or something worse: are we just contingent parasites on the fabric of being, or symptoms of a more serious condition? 

What does brother Nicolás say? Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

This question is tied into the cosmos as a whole, since persons, and only persons, reveal (and are revealed by) a directionality in the structure of being: we are here, the big bang is back there, and we know it. How to account for this implausible development? How do subjects emerge from objects, biology from physics, freedom from necessity, etc? In a word, transcendence: by virtue of what principle is it here?

If human beings didn't exist, we would have no trouble whatsoever explaining the fact. But here we are, the most inexplicable fact conceivable. No wonder people turn to religion. Got any better ideas?

No one wants to toss out science, least of all me. However, when the anomalies, contradictions, and exceptions begin to pile up, we need to rethink its foundation. For

The seeming exception is in reality very often the symptom that shows us the insufficiency of our previous schema of order, which helps us to break open this schema and to conquer a new realm of reality (Ratzinger).

We're all familiar with Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Science can take care of itself, so long as it stays in its lane. What we need is a metascientific revolution. 

Come to think of it, some people think Christ was some kind of revolutionary. Well, he was. Just not a political one. 

And Petey has suggested that Christ didn't intend to found a religion -- rather, the cure for religion, and who could blame him? After all, the Way is not fundamentally an abstract idea, rather, a concrete person, an event -- an event that is prolonged in time, to be sure, but an event nonetheless. We're participating in it right now -- or vice versa, we hope. 

The exception shows us that we have built our closets too small, as it were, and that we must break them open and go on in order to see the whole (ibid.). 

Now, no one should be confined to the closet for simply believing the universe is queerer than we can suppose. Grow up: there are a lot of us out there. Moreover, it's who we are: transpersonal!

Lets' treat it like any other hypothesis: let's suppose that Christ is

the true fulfillment of the idea of the human person, in which the direction of meaning of this [human] being comes fully to light for the first time (ibid.).

How would we go about proving this hypothesis? Or maybe we can start by disproving the null hypothesis: that the message of Christ has no meaning or significance, whether personal or cosmic.

I ruled out the latter quite some tome ago. Not only does it explain nothing, it unexplains too much we know to be the case, both logically and experientially. 

Nothing is lost in believing ultimate reality is personal, for

human existence is not canceled, but comes to its highest possibility, which consists in transcending itself into the absolute and in the integration of its own relativity into the absoluteness of divine love (ibid.).

This is SCIENCE, so the allusion to love makes me a tad uncomfortable. Nevertheless, scientifically speaking, what is a human person without love? You don't want to know. 

Okay, a monster: take a human person, deprive it of all love, and that's what you'll end up with. Conversely, "Love is the act that transforms its object from a thing into a person" (Dávila).

Anyway, back to the irreversible temporal flow of the cosmos:

Christ is the directional arrow, as it were, that indicates what being human tends toward, although, as long as history is still on the way, this goal is never reached.  

Don't worry: this just means time and timelessness are complementary; or that time is a function of eternity. Come to think of it, for our purposes, there is only the present moment and eternity, the rest being an abstraction. Or in the words of the aphorist,

One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time.

"If person is the relativity toward the eternal" writes Ratzinger, "then this relativity implies 'being on the way' in the manner of human history."

Another important point: as alluded to above vis-a-vis loveless monsters, the I and the We are properly mediated by and in love; now Christ is the very incarnation of this principle,

the integrating space in which the "we" of human beings gathers itself toward the "you" of God. Something emerges here that has not been sufficiently seen in modern philosophy, not even in Christian philosophy.

You don't say. Someone needs to write a blog post! 

Speaking of paradigm shifts,

On both sides there is neither the pure "I," nor the pure "you," but on both sides the "I" is integrated into the greater "we" (ibid.).

Which means that "not even God can be seen as the pure and simple 'I' toward which the person tends" -- or rather, least of all can God, of all persons, be seen this way. And

This trinitarian "we," the fact that even God exists only as a "we," prepares at the same time the space of the human "we."

So we got that going for us. Better yet, 

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago (Dávila).

The Structure of Metascientific Revelations

Okay, the question comes down to, are persons just accidents, or something worse: are we just contingent parasites on the fabric of being, or symptoms of a more serious condition? 

What does brother Nicolás say? Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

This question is tied into the cosmos as a whole, since persons, and only persons, reveal (and are revealed by) a directionality in the structure of being: we are here, the big bang is back there, and we know it. How to account for this implausible development? How do subjects emerge from objects, biology from physics, freedom from necessity, etc? In a word, transcendence: by virtue of what principle is it here?

If human beings didn't exist, we would have no trouble whatsoever explaining the fact. But here we are, the most inexplicable fact conceivable. No wonder people turn to religion. Got any better ideas?

No one wants to toss out science, least of all me. However, when the anomalies, contradictions, and exceptions begin to pile up, we need to rethink its foundation. For

The seeming exception is in reality very often the symptom that shows us the insufficiency of our previous schema of order, which helps us to break open this schema and to conquer a new realm of reality (Ratzinger).

We're all familiar with Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Science can take care of itself, so long as it stays in its lane. What we need is a metascientific revolution. 

Come to think of it, some people think Christ was some kind of revolutionary. Well, he was. Just not a political one. 

And Petey has suggested that Christ didn't intend to found a religion -- rather, the cure for religion, and who could blame him? After all, the Way is not fundamentally an abstract idea, rather, a concrete person, an event -- an event that is prolonged in time, to be sure, but an event nonetheless. We're participating in it right now -- or vice versa, we hope. 

The exception shows us that we have built our closets too small, as it were, and that we must break them open and go on in order to see the whole (ibid.). 

Now, no one should be confined to the closet for simply believing the universe is queerer than we can suppose. Grow up: there are a lot of us out there. Moreover, it's who we are: transpersonal!

Lets' treat it like any other hypothesis: let's suppose that Christ is

the true fulfillment of the idea of the human person, in which the direction of meaning of this [human] being comes fully to light for the first time (ibid.).

How would we go about proving this hypothesis? Or maybe we can start by disproving the null hypothesis: that the message of Christ has no meaning or significance, whether personal or cosmic.

I ruled out the latter quite some tome ago. Not only does it explain nothing, it unexplains too much we know to be the case, both logically and experientially. 

Nothing is lost in believing ultimate reality is personal, for

human existence is not canceled, but comes to its highest possibility, which consists in transcending itself into the absolute and in the integration of its own relativity into the absoluteness of divine love (ibid.).

This is SCIENCE, so the allusion to love makes me a tad uncomfortable. Nevertheless, scientifically speaking, what is a human person without love? You don't want to know. 

Okay, a monster: take a human person, deprive it of all love, and that's what you'll end up with. Conversely, "Love is the act that transforms its object from a thing into a person" (Dávila).

Anyway, back to the irreversible temporal flow of the cosmos:

Christ is the directional arrow, as it were, that indicates what being human tends toward, although, as long as history is still on the way, this goal is never reached.  

Don't worry: this just means time and timelessness are complementary; or that time is a function of eternity. Come to think of it, for our purposes, there is only the present moment and eternity, the rest being an abstraction. Or in the words of the aphorist,

One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time.

"If person is the relativity toward the eternal" writes Ratzinger, "then this relativity implies 'being on the way' in the manner of human history."

Another important point: as alluded to above vis-a-vis loveless monsters, the I and the We are properly mediated by and in love; now Christ is the very incarnation of this principle,

the integrating space in which the "we" of human beings gathers itself toward the "you" of God. Something emerges here that has not been sufficiently seen in modern philosophy, not even in Christian philosophy.

You don't say. Someone needs to write a blog post! 

Speaking of paradigm shifts,

On both sides there is neither the pure "I," nor the pure "you," but on both sides the "I" is integrated into the greater "we" (ibid.).

Which means that "not even God can be seen as the pure and simple 'I' toward which the person tends" -- or rather, least of all can God, of all persons, be seen this way. And

This trinitarian "we," the fact that even God exists only as a "we," prepares at the same time the space of the human "we."

So we got that going for us. Better yet, 

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago (Dávila).

Vine, and Yourself?

The previous post left off with a wish and a gnotion: 

Sure would be nice to somehow be grafted onto this timeless [trinitarian] intersubjectivity. I have an idea -- it's crazy but it just might work!

The Incarnation -- and our participation in it -- is crazy from our perspective, as it's not something any merely sane human being would have come up with, nor ever did come up with. As Ratzinger observes in his Jesus of Nazareth,

The reaction of his hearers was clear: This teaching does not come from any school. It is radically different from what can be learned in schools. It is not the kind of explanation or interpretation that is taught there.

Got it: crazy.

Jesus' teaching is not the product of human learning, of whatever kind. It originates from immediate contact with the Father, from "face-to-face" dialogue... 

Okay. Crazier still. 

Perhaps we just need some additional groundwork in order to see that it's not crazy at all. After all, if you took Einstein and inserted him into Newton's time, his ideas would have seemed utterly crazy too. Come to think of it, it's hard not to sound crazy when you're not just trying to communicate a new idea, but a completely novel framework for interpreting everything.  

What is this new framework? Apparently, it is this notion that things are not substances and not processes, but rather, substance-in-relation. In an essay called Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology, Ratzinger writes that 

In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation. 

As it pertains to the First Person of the Trinity, "the act of generating the son" is again not something added on, rather,

the person is the deed of generating.... The person is identical with this act of self-donation.

Ultimately, the Persons 

are nothing but the act of relativity or relationality toward each other. In God, person is the pure relativity of being turned toward the other; it does not lie on the level of substance -- the substance is one -- but on the level of dialogical reality, of relationality toward the other.

Crazy? Or just novel? Here again "we encounter the Christian newness of the personalistic idea in all its sharpness and clarity." For

Relation is here recognized as a third specific fundamental category between substance and accident....

And mere craziness would be in the realm of accident or contingency, not what we mean by the principle of God as an open system of relationality between persons. For "a profound illumination of God as well as man occurs here, the decisive illumination of what person must mean": that neither God nor man is

a substance that closes itself in itself, but the phenomenon of complete relativity, which is, of course, realized in its entirety only in the one who is God, but which indicates the direction of all personal being (emphasis mine).

That direction is again toward self-transcendence (in and toward God), as we've been saying, for it is the message that is Jesus himself: 

He is like the one who sent him precisely because he stands in complete relativity of existence toward the one who sent him.... The content of Jesus' existence is "being from someone and toward someone," the absolute openness of existence without any reservation of what is merely and properly one's own.

Crazy? Yes and no: "In important respects, what was decisive for him was not so much the idea of an eternal rationality." Instead, 

what was decisive was much rather the relativity of existence that lies in the concept of the Logos. 

For again, the point is that a word is essentially from someone else and toward someone else; word is existence that is completely path and openness. 

Bottom line for today:

Christ's doctrine is he himself, and he himself is not his own, because his "I" exists entirely from the "you." 

Applied to the restavus,

Your "I" is on the one hand what is most your own and at the same time what you have least of yourself; it is most of all not your own, because it is only from the "you" that it can exist as an "I" in the first place (Ratzinger).

Vine, and Yourself?

The previous post left off with a wish and a gnotion: 

Sure would be nice to somehow be grafted onto this timeless [trinitarian] intersubjectivity. I have an idea -- it's crazy but it just might work!

The Incarnation -- and our participation in it -- is crazy from our perspective, as it's not something any merely sane human being would have come up with, nor ever did come up with. As Ratzinger observes in his Jesus of Nazareth,

The reaction of his hearers was clear: This teaching does not come from any school. It is radically different from what can be learned in schools. It is not the kind of explanation or interpretation that is taught there.

Got it: crazy.

Jesus' teaching is not the product of human learning, of whatever kind. It originates from immediate contact with the Father, from "face-to-face" dialogue... 

Okay. Crazier still. 

Perhaps we just need some additional groundwork in order to see that it's not crazy at all. After all, if you took Einstein and inserted him into Newton's time, his ideas would have seemed utterly crazy too. Come to think of it, it's hard not to sound crazy when you're not just trying to communicate a new idea, but a completely novel framework for interpreting everything.  

What is this new framework? Apparently, it is this notion that things are not substances and not processes, but rather, substance-in-relation. In an essay called Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology, Ratzinger writes that 

In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation. 

As it pertains to the First Person of the Trinity, "the act of generating the son" is again not something added on, rather,

the person is the deed of generating.... The person is identical with this act of self-donation.

Ultimately, the Persons 

are nothing but the act of relativity or relationality toward each other. In God, person is the pure relativity of being turned toward the other; it does not lie on the level of substance -- the substance is one -- but on the level of dialogical reality, of relationality toward the other.

Crazy? Or just novel? Here again "we encounter the Christian newness of the personalistic idea in all its sharpness and clarity." For

Relation is here recognized as a third specific fundamental category between substance and accident....

And mere craziness would be in the realm of accident or contingency, not what we mean by the principle of God as an open system of relationality between persons. For "a profound illumination of God as well as man occurs here, the decisive illumination of what person must mean": that neither God nor man is

a substance that closes itself in itself, but the phenomenon of complete relativity, which is, of course, realized in its entirety only in the one who is God, but which indicates the direction of all personal being (emphasis mine).

That direction is again toward self-transcendence (in and toward God), as we've been saying, for it is the message that is Jesus himself: 

He is like the one who sent him precisely because he stands in complete relativity of existence toward the one who sent him.... The content of Jesus' existence is "being from someone and toward someone," the absolute openness of existence without any reservation of what is merely and properly one's own.

Crazy? Yes and no: "In important respects, what was decisive for him was not so much the idea of an eternal rationality." Instead, 

what was decisive was much rather the relativity of existence that lies in the concept of the Logos. 

For again, the point is that a word is essentially from someone else and toward someone else; word is existence that is completely path and openness. 

Bottom line for today:

Christ's doctrine is he himself, and he himself is not his own, because his "I" exists entirely from the "you." 

Applied to the restavus,

Your "I" is on the one hand what is most your own and at the same time what you have least of yourself; it is most of all not your own, because it is only from the "you" that it can exist as an "I" in the first place (Ratzinger).

Godsplaining the Cosmos

Continuing with the subject of the intrinsic self-transcendence of the person, Clarke writes of how "all existing beings tend to reach beyond themselves and to form larger unities." 

However, only personal being can do so consciously and freely, or with intelligence and will. It is in this latter sense that "we see clearly the full meaning of the whole restless movement of the cosmos," i.e., where it's been and where it's headed, Alpha and Omega.

Speaking of Whom, note that prior to any message from Jesus is the message of Jesus; Jesus himself is the message he brings, and for good reason, since the message is the person as such, and the entire person must be redeemed -- or in the words of Gregory Naziazen, What has not been assumed has not been healed. Therefore, it would appear that the Incarnation touches on the health of the entire cosmos.

Which is either the best or craziest idea ever. If it's the former, then,

as images of God, we too must imitate in our own way the ecstatic, outgoing self-sharing of God as Infinite Good. Personal development in a created person is to become more and more like God.

Okay. Like how?

What I am talking about is a radical decentering of consciousness from self to God.... We are drawn out of ourselves, called now to focus on the Great Center beyond us -- also within us, of course -- to take as our own center the One Center and Source of the whole universe...

In the bʘʘk I called it the Great Attractor, but the meaning is the same; likewise, I referred to the two potential centers (or centers of potential) in man as (•) and (¶); the former is oriented to the World, the latter to O, or Celestial Central. 

Between (¶) and O is the Cosmic Telovator, or the nonlocal "place" where self-transcendence occurs. But it's really just a space-age name for old Jacob's ladder.

I prefer telovator, because it is a more dynamic image than ladder. For this is the very dynamo behind the "ecstatic decentering movement" alluded to above:

It is the pull of the Infinite Good, drawing the whole person as finite spirit toward the total fulfillment it longs for, at first implicitly, finally more explicitly.... 

This is the deep finality built into the very nature of every finite being as spirit, endowed with intellect and will, which can be satisfied only by the total plenitude of being as true (intelligible), good, and beautiful.

In other words, O or bust! Nothing short of this union will suffice.  

Now, if persons are the telos of cosmic development, then the Trinity is the telos of the person, wherein its immanent dynamic is revealed to be a circular movement or procession 

from the Father to the Son to the Holy Spirit, then back again through the Son to the Father, in an intense, timeless, always completed yet always going on, ecstasy of intercommunion. 

Sure would be nice to somehow be grafted onto this timeless intersubjectivity. I have an idea -- it's crazy but it just might work!

Godsplaining the Cosmos

Continuing with the subject of the intrinsic self-transcendence of the person, Clarke writes of how "all existing beings tend to reach beyond themselves and to form larger unities." 

However, only personal being can do so consciously and freely, or with intelligence and will. It is in this latter sense that "we see clearly the full meaning of the whole restless movement of the cosmos," i.e., where it's been and where it's headed, Alpha and Omega.

Speaking of Whom, note that prior to any message from Jesus is the message of Jesus; Jesus himself is the message he brings, and for good reason, since the message is the person as such, and the entire person must be redeemed -- or in the words of Gregory Naziazen, What has not been assumed has not been healed. Therefore, it would appear that the Incarnation touches on the health of the entire cosmos.

Which is either the best or craziest idea ever. If it's the former, then,

as images of God, we too must imitate in our own way the ecstatic, outgoing self-sharing of God as Infinite Good. Personal development in a created person is to become more and more like God.

Okay. Like how?

What I am talking about is a radical decentering of consciousness from self to God.... We are drawn out of ourselves, called now to focus on the Great Center beyond us -- also within us, of course -- to take as our own center the One Center and Source of the whole universe...

In the bʘʘk I called it the Great Attractor, but the meaning is the same; likewise, I referred to the two potential centers (or centers of potential) in man as (•) and (¶); the former is oriented to the World, the latter to O, or Celestial Central. 

Between (¶) and O is the Cosmic Telovator, or the nonlocal "place" where self-transcendence occurs. But it's really just a space-age name for old Jacob's ladder.

I prefer telovator, because it is a more dynamic image than ladder. For this is the very dynamo behind the "ecstatic decentering movement" alluded to above:

It is the pull of the Infinite Good, drawing the whole person as finite spirit toward the total fulfillment it longs for, at first implicitly, finally more explicitly.... 

This is the deep finality built into the very nature of every finite being as spirit, endowed with intellect and will, which can be satisfied only by the total plenitude of being as true (intelligible), good, and beautiful.

In other words, O or bust! Nothing short of this union will suffice.  

Now, if persons are the telos of cosmic development, then the Trinity is the telos of the person, wherein its immanent dynamic is revealed to be a circular movement or procession 

from the Father to the Son to the Holy Spirit, then back again through the Son to the Father, in an intense, timeless, always completed yet always going on, ecstasy of intercommunion. 

Sure would be nice to somehow be grafted onto this timeless intersubjectivity. I have an idea -- it's crazy but it just might work!

Because We Said So

Our friend Nicolás reminds us... of a lot of things, but in this case we're thinking of how our first and last Principle must rest on a final Because I said so, or in other words, on authority. However, much depends upon the reliability or prestige of the authority in question, and afterwards by the fruits of our faith in it: if we're wrong, reality will let us know.

Irrespective of how sublime or mundane your Principle of principles, it can never be proved absolutely, and therefore must be taken on faith. Both the world and God are always what they are, no matter what we say or believe they are, nor can we ever know a single thing with God's certitude. But if life weren't a Mystery, we'd be plunged into endless boredom:

Happily, the world is inexplicable. (What kind of world would it be if it could be explained by man?)

On the one hand, science can can tell us what is, but it can never tell us what isness is, nor what ought to be, not forgetting what we ought to do about it. For

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but is merely current.

And ultimately,

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything.

To be precise, it will have failed to explain what we most wish to explain, which is to say, the Explainer, AKA the person. Is there a merely rational way to do so? Yes and no: yes because there is no better explanation, no because no explanation is fully sufficient, unless you are very, very incurious:

The man does not escape from his prison of paradoxes except by means of a vertical act of faith.

And let's suppose that

Faith is not knowledge of the object. But communication with it.

Along these lines, Clarke writes of how the acceptance of an explicitly Christian philosophy can advance philosophy as such. 

Put conversely, left to its own devices, philosophy can by definition only advance so far and no farther, since -- among other limitations -- any form of rationalism will necessarily be enclosed in its own premises a la Gödel: garbage in, tenure out:

To say that something is “rational,” without indicating in relation to what postulate, is a meaningless statement.

Many if not most folks believe they're being rational when they're merely being absurcular, even putting a childishly absolute faith in their faithlessness. You know the type.

On the other hand, revelation can open up

a new possibility in the nature of being that we might never have thought of ourselves from our limited human experience, but which, once opened up, is so illuminating that it now shines on its own and as an insight into the nature of being and persons that makes many things suddenly fall into place whose depths we could not fathom before.

Let there be Light -- the blindingly obvious kind: 

[T]he doctrine of the Trinity is a uniquely powerful source of illumination in both the philosophy of being and the philosophy of the person.

Speaking as a psychologist, every metapsychology (i.e., the first principles of psychology) short of this either assumes the existence of the person or explains this existence away. But in reality, the reason why we are the way we are is precisely because the Supreme Reality is the way it is they are. Apologies if we threepeat ourselves, but what if our destiny -- or telos -- 

is to fulfill the image latent within us and to draw it out into manifest likeness.... This is the deep finality built into the very nature of every finite being as spirit, endowed with intellect and will.

Thus, human personhood involves an intrinsic element of self-transcendence, something Schuon often highlights, for example, 

The paradox of the human condition is that nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming.

And obviously, no God = no transcendence. Or, to put it the other way around, the fact that we (AKA the spiritually living) are always transcending is sufficient proof of God.

We'll leave off with a blunt aphorism and continue this deuscussion in the next post:

Truth is a person.

Because We Said So

Our friend Nicolás reminds us... of a lot of things, but in this case we're thinking of how our first and last Principle must rest on a final Because I said so, or in other words, on authority. However, much depends upon the reliability or prestige of the authority in question, and afterwards by the fruits of our faith in it: if we're wrong, reality will let us know.

Irrespective of how sublime or mundane your Principle of principles, it can never be proved absolutely, and therefore must be taken on faith. Both the world and God are always what they are, no matter what we say or believe they are, nor can we ever know a single thing with God's certitude. But if life weren't a Mystery, we'd be plunged into endless boredom:

Happily, the world is inexplicable. (What kind of world would it be if it could be explained by man?)

On the one hand, science can can tell us what is, but it can never tell us what isness is, nor what ought to be, not forgetting what we ought to do about it. For

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but is merely current.

And ultimately,

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything.

To be precise, it will have failed to explain what we most wish to explain, which is to say, the Explainer, AKA the person. Is there a merely rational way to do so? Yes and no: yes because there is no better explanation, no because no explanation is fully sufficient, unless you are very, very incurious:

The man does not escape from his prison of paradoxes except by means of a vertical act of faith.

And let's suppose that

Faith is not knowledge of the object. But communication with it.

Along these lines, Clarke writes of how the acceptance of an explicitly Christian philosophy can advance philosophy as such. 

Put conversely, left to its own devices, philosophy can by definition only advance so far and no farther, since -- among other limitations -- any form of rationalism will necessarily be enclosed in its own premises a la Gödel: garbage in, tenure out:

To say that something is “rational,” without indicating in relation to what postulate, is a meaningless statement.

Many if not most folks believe they're being rational when they're merely being absurcular, even putting a childishly absolute faith in their faithlessness. You know the type.

On the other hand, revelation can open up

a new possibility in the nature of being that we might never have thought of ourselves from our limited human experience, but which, once opened up, is so illuminating that it now shines on its own and as an insight into the nature of being and persons that makes many things suddenly fall into place whose depths we could not fathom before.

Let there be Light -- the blindingly obvious kind: 

[T]he doctrine of the Trinity is a uniquely powerful source of illumination in both the philosophy of being and the philosophy of the person.

Speaking as a psychologist, every metapsychology (i.e., the first principles of psychology) short of this either assumes the existence of the person or explains this existence away. But in reality, the reason why we are the way we are is precisely because the Supreme Reality is the way it is they are. Apologies if we threepeat ourselves, but what if our destiny -- or telos -- 

is to fulfill the image latent within us and to draw it out into manifest likeness.... This is the deep finality built into the very nature of every finite being as spirit, endowed with intellect and will.

Thus, human personhood involves an intrinsic element of self-transcendence, something Schuon often highlights, for example, 

The paradox of the human condition is that nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming.

And obviously, no God = no transcendence. Or, to put it the other way around, the fact that we (AKA the spiritually living) are always transcending is sufficient proof of God.

We'll leave off with a blunt aphorism and continue this deuscussion in the next post:

Truth is a person.

Systemic Communion and Metastatic Groomers

Let's review: if the ultimate real is substance-in-relation, then it is a kind of literal communion, not reducible to anything less.

There is no viable substitute for communion; this is the law of being itself (Clarke). 

This applies quintessentially to the Godhead, which is the sufficient reason or Principle of the self-communication of everything down here, AKA their intelligibility-to-intelligence.

If there is to be effective self-communication of any being, there must be a corresponding receptivity for it somewhere in being, otherwise the process would be aborted from the start. In a word there can be no giving without receiving.

If communication and receptivity are both situated in divinas, then each is a positive perfection: yes, God listens to us, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

We discussed this not too long ago, but there's no harm in re-belaboring such an important point, especially since no one else on the entire internet, as far as I can tell, is saying it. 

Besides, we discussed it with reference to Hartshorne, who is more than a little nutty heteroclite in his theology, whereas Clarke is cosmically orthodox.  

Even the metaphysicians out there -- wherever you are -- tend to equate "receptivity with the deficiency side of being, i.e., with poverty, potentiality, a prior lack to be filled up."

So, we need to rejigger our notion of receptivity, freeing it of any such privative implications and insinuendos. Is this possible? Don't ask me. I'm in the middle of writing this post.

What could be the ontological value of receptivity?

I know: it is the condition without which love is impossible, and rumor has it that love is the perfection of perfections. 

Very good: it reminds me of the ontological category of mystery, which is not a void, absence, or mere ignorance, but rather, a positive presence. Likewise, God's receptivity cannot be understood as a mere absence or lack; rather, it must be an active-receptivity or receptive-activity, so to speak. 

We certainly see this trend in the rest of creation; we have only to follow it all the way up and see where it leads:

the higher up the scale of created reality one goes the more this passivity (in the sense of an active receptivity) increases, and the more it may be seen, in the case of human interpersonal encounter, as a perfection.

So, if God is perfect, then he must be the most receptive of all. 

Which suddenly reminds me of the virtue of gratitude, which is the key to happiness. Its contradiction is envy, which is the cause and consequence of the misery of the progressive left. It is also noteworthy that the animating emotion of the left is a related cosmic privation, hatred. 

Let's say you're Satan, and you want to teach people how to be miserable. How would you go about it? Easy: inculcate envy-ingratitude and hatred-resentment, and gravity takes care of the rest. 

Truly, envy is the Satanic communion, a twisted caricature of the real thing. It's a big reason the left can only destroy, never build. And it always needs fresh bodies -- or souls rather -- to feed its vampiric appetite.  

Metastatic groomers. 'Nuff said. For now. 

Back to Clarke:

to be gifted and to be grateful are in themselves not a sign of inferiority or deficiency at all, but a part of the splendor and wonder of being itself at its highest actualization, that is, being as communion.

I haven't decided whether the official Trinity is a mythopoetic way of talking about this Ultimate Principle or if it is the Ultimate Principle, full stop. But that's my problem. Either way, it is "revealed to us by the Source itself," whereby 

being as receptivity is present in the Son and the Spirit at its most intense, as a pure perfection of existence at its highest, and hence of absolutely equal ontological worth and value with being as self-communicative. 

Therefore, 

within the unity of the Supreme Being the Father is subsistent Self-Communication, while the Son is subsistent Receptivity....

Except that each Person is a fractal of the whole, so the Son gives back to the Father as much as he receives, and the Father receives in love-gratitude as much as he gives. It's a non-stop communion up there!

I guess that's enough for one post. I can never tell if I've gone too far or not far enough.

Systemic Communion and Metastatic Groomers

Let's review: if the ultimate real is substance-in-relation, then it is a kind of literal communion, not reducible to anything less.

There is no viable substitute for communion; this is the law of being itself (Clarke). 

This applies quintessentially to the Godhead, which is the sufficient reason or Principle of the self-communication of everything down here, AKA their intelligibility-to-intelligence.

If there is to be effective self-communication of any being, there must be a corresponding receptivity for it somewhere in being, otherwise the process would be aborted from the start. In a word there can be no giving without receiving.

If communication and receptivity are both situated in divinas, then each is a positive perfection: yes, God listens to us, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

We discussed this not too long ago, but there's no harm in re-belaboring such an important point, especially since no one else on the entire internet, as far as I can tell, is saying it. 

Besides, we discussed it with reference to Hartshorne, who is more than a little nutty heteroclite in his theology, whereas Clarke is cosmically orthodox.  

Even the metaphysicians out there -- wherever you are -- tend to equate "receptivity with the deficiency side of being, i.e., with poverty, potentiality, a prior lack to be filled up."

So, we need to rejigger our notion of receptivity, freeing it of any such privative implications and insinuendos. Is this possible? Don't ask me. I'm in the middle of writing this post.

What could be the ontological value of receptivity?

I know: it is the condition without which love is impossible, and rumor has it that love is the perfection of perfections. 

Very good: it reminds me of the ontological category of mystery, which is not a void, absence, or mere ignorance, but rather, a positive presence. Likewise, God's receptivity cannot be understood as a mere absence or lack; rather, it must be an active-receptivity or receptive-activity, so to speak. 

We certainly see this trend in the rest of creation; we have only to follow it all the way up and see where it leads:

the higher up the scale of created reality one goes the more this passivity (in the sense of an active receptivity) increases, and the more it may be seen, in the case of human interpersonal encounter, as a perfection.

So, if God is perfect, then he must be the most receptive of all. 

Which suddenly reminds me of the virtue of gratitude, which is the key to happiness. Its contradiction is envy, which is the cause and consequence of the misery of the progressive left. It is also noteworthy that the animating emotion of the left is a related cosmic privation, hatred. 

Let's say you're Satan, and you want to teach people how to be miserable. How would you go about it? Easy: inculcate envy-ingratitude and hatred-resentment, and gravity takes care of the rest. 

Truly, envy is the Satanic communion, a twisted caricature of the real thing. It's a big reason the left can only destroy, never build. And it always needs fresh bodies -- or souls rather -- to feed its vampiric appetite.  

Metastatic groomers. 'Nuff said. For now. 

Back to Clarke:

to be gifted and to be grateful are in themselves not a sign of inferiority or deficiency at all, but a part of the splendor and wonder of being itself at its highest actualization, that is, being as communion.

I haven't decided whether the official Trinity is a mythopoetic way of talking about this Ultimate Principle or if it is the Ultimate Principle, full stop. But that's my problem. Either way, it is "revealed to us by the Source itself," whereby 

being as receptivity is present in the Son and the Spirit at its most intense, as a pure perfection of existence at its highest, and hence of absolutely equal ontological worth and value with being as self-communicative. 

Therefore, 

within the unity of the Supreme Being the Father is subsistent Self-Communication, while the Son is subsistent Receptivity....

Except that each Person is a fractal of the whole, so the Son gives back to the Father as much as he receives, and the Father receives in love-gratitude as much as he gives. It's a non-stop communion up there!

I guess that's enough for one post. I can never tell if I've gone too far or not far enough.

A Remedy for Finitude

Continuing with our Trump obsession meditations on the relationship of cosmos and person, yesterday I read a book called The Greatest Marvel of Nature: An Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person, by Pierre Emonet, but it was somewhat less than marvelous, not on the same level as Clarke's Person and Being. 

Let me flip through it and see if there's anything that advances the argument, or at least repeats it, since we welcome any scholarly backup from nonlocal explorers in the same attractor. 

For example, Emonet agrees with the Raccoon doctrine that the person is an open system that specifically "opens out upon the infinite." He further agrees that the soul is a kind of totality "capable of containing within itself all that is," AKA the whole existentialada.   

And here's an intriguing quote: "Together, consciousness and things 'super-exist.'" Moreover, consistent with what we were saying the other day about cosmic depth, "we shall never find the floor of the soul" -- nor its height or breadth for that matter. 

There are also some good things on the undeniable immateriality of the soul, for example, vis-a-vis "common sense" -- no, not the everyday common sense which is merely the polar opposite of progressivism, but rather, the soul's capacity to integrate and synthesize information from the external senses. 

Obviously, the senses don't know anything; to be perfectly accurate, the senses can affirm that something is, but they can never say what that something is, since they know nothing of essences. 

But what really interests One Cosmos readers -- or this one, anyway -- is the even higher and deeper unification and synthesis of all the nonsense understood by the soul. 

For example, we know that atoms, chemicals, organisms, and persons exist, but how do we synthesize all these diverse strands? Yes, there's always the path of reductionism, but let the dead bury the trolls and the trolls bury the tenured.  

There's an interesting etymological analysis of "intellect," which connotes "reading within" (intus = within, lectus = gathering or reading). As we've been saying, everything, it turns out, has a within, and the intellect is how we access this fathomless world of intelligibility: senses are to the Great Without what intellect is to the Great Within of the cosmos. 

Here's a coincidence: yesterday we alluded to cosmic communion via ex- and in-spiration. Well, the intellect "inhales essences." Moreover, the intellect is to intelligible objects as the sun is to objects of vision: it is a kind of "inner sun" through which the intelligible world veritably glows. We might call it the metaphysical translucence of being.

Here's another brief passage that opens worlds and meta-worlds: "Grammar implies a whole philosophy." That's a tempting rabbit hole to jump into, but I think we'll get back to Person and Being. Suffice it to say that In the beginning is the Word, but that any word implies a grammar, and that -- now that I'm thinking about it -- the Trinity must be this grammar. We'll probably come back to this idea later, since it's a pretty big deal.

Remember what we said above about super-existence? Well, "Thomas speaks of the power of the finite mind"

to gather up and "inscribe the whole order of the universe" in the unity of its own consciousness, "as a remedy for its finitude" (Clarke).

A remedy for finitude? One that doesn't involve the old snake oil, i.e., Ye shall be as gods? We'll take one bottle please!

What kind of bottle? 

Longtome readers know exactly what kind: a Klein bottle, in which the inside is the outside and vice versa. I ask you: how could the cosmos be structured in any other way, since this reveals how intelligence and intelligibility, within and without, are two sides of the same reality? Indeed, just knowing this is half the bottle.

A Remedy for Finitude

Continuing with our Trump obsession meditations on the relationship of cosmos and person, yesterday I read a book called The Greatest Marvel of Nature: An Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person, by Pierre Emonet, but it was somewhat less than marvelous, not on the same level as Clarke's Person and Being. 

Let me flip through it and see if there's anything that advances the argument, or at least repeats it, since we welcome any scholarly backup from nonlocal explorers in the same attractor. 

For example, Emonet agrees with the Raccoon doctrine that the person is an open system that specifically "opens out upon the infinite." He further agrees that the soul is a kind of totality "capable of containing within itself all that is," AKA the whole existentialada.   

And here's an intriguing quote: "Together, consciousness and things 'super-exist.'" Moreover, consistent with what we were saying the other day about cosmic depth, "we shall never find the floor of the soul" -- nor its height or breadth for that matter. 

There are also some good things on the undeniable immateriality of the soul, for example, vis-a-vis "common sense" -- no, not the everyday common sense which is merely the polar opposite of progressivism, but rather, the soul's capacity to integrate and synthesize information from the external senses. 

Obviously, the senses don't know anything; to be perfectly accurate, the senses can affirm that something is, but they can never say what that something is, since they know nothing of essences. 

But what really interests One Cosmos readers -- or this one, anyway -- is the even higher and deeper unification and synthesis of all the nonsense understood by the soul. 

For example, we know that atoms, chemicals, organisms, and persons exist, but how do we synthesize all these diverse strands? Yes, there's always the path of reductionism, but let the dead bury the trolls and the trolls bury the tenured.  

There's an interesting etymological analysis of "intellect," which connotes "reading within" (intus = within, lectus = gathering or reading). As we've been saying, everything, it turns out, has a within, and the intellect is how we access this fathomless world of intelligibility: senses are to the Great Without what intellect is to the Great Within of the cosmos. 

Here's a coincidence: yesterday we alluded to cosmic communion via ex- and in-spiration. Well, the intellect "inhales essences." Moreover, the intellect is to intelligible objects as the sun is to objects of vision: it is a kind of "inner sun" through which the intelligible world veritably glows. We might call it the metaphysical translucence of being.

Here's another brief passage that opens worlds and meta-worlds: "Grammar implies a whole philosophy." That's a tempting rabbit hole to jump into, but I think we'll get back to Person and Being. Suffice it to say that In the beginning is the Word, but that any word implies a grammar, and that -- now that I'm thinking about it -- the Trinity must be this grammar. We'll probably come back to this idea later, since it's a pretty big deal.

Remember what we said above about super-existence? Well, "Thomas speaks of the power of the finite mind"

to gather up and "inscribe the whole order of the universe" in the unity of its own consciousness, "as a remedy for its finitude" (Clarke).

A remedy for finitude? One that doesn't involve the old snake oil, i.e., Ye shall be as gods? We'll take one bottle please!

What kind of bottle? 

Longtome readers know exactly what kind: a Klein bottle, in which the inside is the outside and vice versa. I ask you: how could the cosmos be structured in any other way, since this reveals how intelligence and intelligibility, within and without, are two sides of the same reality? Indeed, just knowing this is half the bottle.