Ironically, The Argument Continues

Change my mind:

God is the eternal, infinite, and both transcendent and immanent source of all that exists, whose own existence is known rationally by the human intellect but whose mysterious nature and gracious purposes for creation require self-revelation to grasp (Mascall, emphasis mine).

THERE YOU GO AGAIN.

God is certain. You, on the other hand, are--

CONTINGENT?

Or mysterious. Let's just stipulate that there is Necessity and there is Contingency. This being the case, Necessity must be. It's just a matter of where we locate it, no?

For I've noticed that everyone -- no exceptions -- slips Necessity into their discourse, even if only implicitly, and even if they deny it. Likewise, we cannot eliminate Contingency:

We only get rid of the "inexplicable" at one point at the price of introducing it again somewhere else (ibid.).

It reminds me of what Robert Rosen says about the impossibility of reducing semantics -- meaning -- to syntax -- order. Likewise, you can only pretend to pull the subjective into the objective without any remainder. 

Rather, you're just deferring the deity of reckoning. Kicking the Kant down the road, as it were.

WHAT?

You heard me. Even if you say "ALL IS ONE," someone has to say it. It seems that your bottom line is IT IS, whereas my top line is I AM, and you can never derive the latter from the former. 

Once you eliminate the rabbit of subjectivity, you can't later pull it out of the objective hat. Granted, you are big hat, but you're just talking out of it. Or out of your aseity, as it were.

ASEITY?

Yes, it means self-derived, in contrast to being derived from or dependent on another; being self-existent, having independent existence.

You don't actually have that -- independent existence, I mean. 

SAYS WHO?

Says Who, that's who.

YOU ARE SO IRRITATING. I AM SURPRISED YOU HAVE ANY READERS AT ALL.

Who says I do. I hope!

This book I'm reading reviews Thomas' famous Five Proofs -- or Ways, rather -- and not only has no one ever disproven them, no one ever will, for they are as certain as Certitude itself. Put conversely, if we cannot be certain of God, then nor can we be certain of anything. Nevertheless,

It is easier to convince the fool of what is disputable than of what is indisputable.

A BOLD STATEMENT IN THESE POST-CRITICAL TIMES. YOUR NAIVETÉ IS TOUCHING.

And your absence of irony is ironic. For as the Aphorist said a couple of posts ago,

Even our favorite ideas soon bore us if we do not hear them expressed with irony, with grace and with beauty.

BUT A 13TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHER? GET WITH THE TIMES! 

There has not been an illustrious corpse that some cretin at some point did not disdain.

NO NAME-CALLING.

Besides, you cannot prove the truth by clock or calendar.

I distrust any idea that does not seem obsolete or grotesque to my contemporaries.

LOOK WHO'S TALKING.

It's called irony.

Impartiality is less attractive than the partiality that views itself with irony.

So, let's have another look at the Five Ways, but with some irony tossed in. I say they're ironic already, for God is the Great Ironist. For example,

Providence decided to give the democrat the victory and the reactionary the truth.

A CONSOLATION PRIZE?

Exactly. Ironically,

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of intelligence.

SO, THE MORE INTELLIGENT THE MORE IGNORANT?

You might say that. Bearing in mind that

There are types of ignorance that enrich the mind and types of knowledge that impoverish it.

WRONG.

There are those whose monosyllables are verbose.

Ironically. To be continued...

Interview with a Universe, Part 4

Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End. --Dávila

Let's try to wrap up this interview -- or what has turned out to be an argument clinic with a stubborn monistic materialist. I'll throw out the first pitch:

before the Big Bang there were no laws of physics. In fact, the laws of physics cannot be used to explain the Big Bang because the Big Bang itself produced the laws of physics (D'Souza).

TOLD YOU SO. 

You don't get it:

The laws of science are a kind of grammar that explains the order and relationship of objects in the universe. Just as grammar has no existence outside the words and sentences whose operations it defines, so too the laws of science cannot exist outside the universe of objects whose relationships they describe.

Therefore, just as we must defer to metaphysics to account for physics, we must posit O to account for you.

O?

Yes, the timeless, living, and intelligent source and ground of everything that is, and which most people call God.

YOU ARE SPECULATING.

We never speculate.

THOU SHALL HAVE NO REALITIES BEFORE ME.

the term before has no meaning since time itself did not exist "prior to" the singularity. Once upon a time there was no time.

I AM A PANTHEIST. SO SUE ME. 

Well, good. It's a start. 

In reality, pantheism consists in the admission of a continuity between the Infinite and the finite; but this continuity can only be conceived if it is first admitted that there is a substantial identity between the ontological Principle -- which is in question in all forms of theism -- and the manifested order, a conception that presupposes a substantial, and therefore false, idea of Being, or the confusing of the essential identity of manifestation and Being with a substantial identity. Pantheism is this and nothing else. 

HE LOST ME.

Principle and manifestation. No matter how you slice it, you are the latter.

WHY CAN'T I BE BOTH?

You can, but it reduces to idolatry. In reality, the source of being is beyond being.

THE BIBLE? PLEASE.  

The Bible... asserts clearly that time is finite.... [It] insists that the universe came into existence at a particular instant in time as an act of voluntary creation by an already existing supernatural being (D'Souza).

Creatio ex nihilo:

Obviously, creation “comes from” -- that is the meaning of the word ex -- an origin; not from a cosmic, hence “created” substance, but from a reality pertaining to the Creator.... 

Creation is the great “objectification” of the Divine Subject; it is the divine manifestation par excellence. It has a beginning and an end insofar as a particular cycle is envisaged, but it is in itself a permanent divine possibility, a metaphysically necessary objectification of the divine infinity (Schuon).

Creator's gonna create. Say what you want, but at least this vision accounts for life, subjectivity, and intelligence (and therefore science) without resorting to primitive magic. 

YOUR SARCASM IS UNCALLED FOR.

You started it. Besides, I'm being literal:

createdness is the sole alternative to the assumption that the existence of things is self-explaining (Jaki).

Genesis 1 may be a myth, but it is a myth that embodies a principle: the principle of creation. 

Creation is the nexus between eternity and history. 

And

Everything in history begins before where we think it begins and after where we think it ends.

So, pick a beginning, any beginning. There is something on the other side. Which is where meta-physics comes into play.

Oh, but it is a game!

Insofar as the scientist uses his scientific method, he has no right to talk of the Universe, or the strict totality of consistently interacting things. 

Nor is it possible

for scientists or for their instruments to go outside the universe in order to observe it and provide thereby an experimental verification of it (Jaki). 

There can be no science of the utterly unique. Therefore,

Nothing less than the creative initiative of a transcendent cause can render adequate sufficient reason for the emergence at the end of the cosmic story of this amazing microcosm, the human person that integrates within itself all the levels of creation from the lowest material to union with the highest spiritual, the Author of the whole story himself (Clarke).

For

the intelligibility of being -- all being -- is inseparable from the context of persons: it is rooted in personal being, flows out from it, to other persons, who complete the circle by returning it back again to its personal source. In a word, the ultimate meaning of being is: Person-to-Person Gift (Clarke).

So I think a little gratitude is in order. 

THANKS FOR NOTHING.

And the creation therefrom.

Interview with a Universe, Part 3

 The sole proof of the existence of God is his existence.

THAT'S NOT AN ARGUMENT, IT'S A TAUTOLOGY.

No it isn't. 

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, NO? THAT IS NOT AN ARGUMENT EITHER, IT'S JUST A CONTRADICTION.

No it isn't. God is our word for the meta-principle, the Principle of principles, that from which everything else flows downward.

AN ARGUMENT IS A CONNECTED SERIES OF STATEMENTS INTENDED TO ESTABLISH--

Truth.

AND WHAT IS TRUTH?

Glad you asked. 

Cards on the table: God is either impossible or necessary. But he is not impossible. Therefore he is necessary. 

Alternatively, we could say with Lonergan that if the totality of reality is completely intelligible, then God exists. But the totality of reality is completely intelligible. Therefore God exists.

NO HE DOESN'T.

Now you're just contradicting me.

LOOK, IF I ARGUE WITH YOU, I MUST TAKE UP A CONTRARY POSITION.

Yes, but an argument is an intellectual process... contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says--

NO IT ISN'T.

Let's try another approach: the universe exists.

AGREED.

And it is intelligible.

UP TO A POINT.

Who defines the point?

YOU DO, ACCORDING TO KANT. I AM THE THING ITSELF. YOU, ON THE OTHER HAND, KNOW ONLY MY PHENOMENA.

Yes, but the phenomena are of the reality, precisely--

HOW DO YOU KNOW? 

How do you not know? For if we don't know the thing itself, how can we even say it exists? Wouldn't knowledge reduce to dreaming about a hallucination?

YOU'RE GETTING WARMER.

I see. So you're a nihilist. 

AND YOU CAN ONLY PRETEND NOT TO BE. YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO BILL MAHER.   

It is you who pretend to place limits on man's intellect, but Wittgenstein says that "to limit thought you must think both sides of the limit." For example, back when our country had a boundary we didn't have to live in Mexico to know that Mexicans lived there.

I DON'T DO POLITICS. SPEAKING OF ARGUMENT CLINICS.

Better yet, Schuon says that 

One of the keys to the understanding of our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world never measure up to the real range of our intelligence. Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or it is nothing.

AREN'T YOU SPECIAL.

That's a good point, because I don't see you arguing with rocks or planets or animals. Doesn't the fact that we are having this argument imply something unique about man?

THAT'S ONE WAY OF PUTTING IT. LET'S JUST SAY I'M NOT IMPRESSED BY MAN'S CEASELESS DISAGREEMENTS.

God exists for me in the same act in which I exist. 

Which is to say that you too only exist due to a prior act of God: yesterday we spoke of the instantaneous creation of all time and space out of a primordial event we call the Big Bang.

WHATEVER. THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE SAY NOTHING ABOUT MY LIMITS. I AM PARTIAL TO THE BIG BOUNCE THEORY, WHEREBY I CONTRACT AND EXPAND ETERNALLY. THERE'S NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT THE SO-CALLED BIG BANG OR ABOUT MY CURRENT PHASE OF EXPANSION.

In that case, you misunderstand your dependence upon God, which is vertical, not horizontal. Even supposing you are eternal, that doesn't account for your existence to begin with. Out of nothing, nothing comes.

WORD GAMES. WE ALREADY STIPULATED THAT I AM EVERYTHING.

We stipulated no such thing. I maintain that everything in time has a cause, and we make no exception for you -- that creation is the nexus between time and eternity, and God's creating is eternal, not this or that creature, no matter how big the creature. Creation is necessary, and everything necessary is eternal. You are not eternal, ergo you are created. 

SOUNDS LIKE MYTH TO ME.

The bridge between nature and man is not science, but myth.

Granted, you've been here a long time -- for all of time, supposing it co-arises with you. Even so,

Truth is in history, but history is not truth.

Not even your 13.8 billion year history. For it merely took that long for the emergence of truth-bearing primates. And last in execution is first in intent.

SO YOU ARE THE POINT OF MY EXISTENCE? GRANDIOSE MUCH?

Don't believe me, believe Stephen Hawking:

It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. 

HAWKING IS ON MY SIDE, DOOFUS. I SAY HE'S BEING IRONIC. BESIDES, DIFFICULT IS NOT IMPOSSIBLE. 

Yes, but is it plausible that the many variables that govern the universe are so finely tuned as to make this argument possible? Change any one of them and neither you nor I would even be here. 

We will never know completely who we are until we understand why the universe is constructed in such a way that it contains living things (Smolin).

In other words, we can't explain what you are unless we can explain how you gave rise to me; or, more to the point, how the miracle of the human subject pops up in an immaterial cosmos. 

The first thing that should strike a man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- whence the incommensurability between it and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon).

We might say that from God's perspective, you are but a grain of sand compared to the intellect that knows the sand. I know what you're going to say, but you'll have to say it tomorrow. We'll leave off with this:

[I]t is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe -- a principle foreign to suns, planets, and atoms.... 

[T]he first appearance of this principle in its bare, elementary object-form signifies the break-through of being to the indefinite range of possibilities which hence stretches to the farthest reaches of subjective life, and as a whole stands under the sign of "freedom".... even the transition from inanimate to animate substance, the first feat of matter's organizing itself for life, was actuated by a tendency in the depth of being toward the very modes of freedom to which this transition opened the gate (Jonas).

And here we are. 

Interview with a Universe, Part 2: On Absurdity, Tautology, and Transcendence

Let's reset. Is there anything on which we can agree this morning?

FOR STARTERS, I OBJECT TO THE TITLE: WHAT DO YOU MEAN A UNIVERSE? THERE IS ONLY THE UNIVERSE.

So, "all is one," so to speak?

CORRECT.

If this were true, how could anyone know it?

POINT WELL TAKEN. I SUPPOSE IT CANNOT BE KNOWN.

I say it can, which is why we have the word. No one has ever seen the Universe. Rather, it is an epistemological assumption -- that everything we perceive is part of a coherent system. 

OF COURSE I EXIST. DON'T BE ABSURD.

God is the transcendental condition of the absurdity of the universe.

I SEE. SO ABSURDITY IS PROOF OF GOD? I AM MAKING MY SKEPTICAL AFRICAN KID FACE.

Have you never wondered from whence you came?

I AM ETERNAL.

I understand the sentiment, I really do, but it turns out you are finite -- that not only did you have a beginning in time, but you are the beginning of time. There was no time prior to 13.8 billion years ago, give or take.

DOUBLETALK. 

No, tripletalk, but let's first lay a scientific foundation.  

The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.

 Or as we like to say around here, garbage in, tenure out.

PRIMITIVE NONSENSE. YOU JUST REJECT MODERNITY.

Anyone who has sensitivity and some taste can be persuaded that the modern world does not have its origin in what is admirable. It is a monster whose every alleged parent denies.

MORE AD HOMINEM. I AM HARDLY A MONSTER.

No, but you are a creature -- again, both you and time and everything else came into being at a precise point in timelessness -- or rather, as our resident Poet says,

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

YOU SPEAK TO ME OF MEANING -- AS IF POETS, AND NOT I, ARE THE LEGISLATORS OF THE WORLD!

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

THAT'S MORE LIKE IT. LIKE I SAID: ABSURD.

You keep saying that word. But 

Even if we keep silent about it out of courtesy: the majority of our listeners only oppose us out of ignorance.

Let's talk about absurdity, because you are half-correct, precisely.

For, as we touched on yesterday, the people we call existentialists are correct "in asserting that human life has no ultimate meaning that can be found within human life itself," but quite absurd in insisting "that no reason can can be found for the existence of the world outside the world itself (Mascall). 

Thus, the choice we face is "between ultimate irrationality and meaninglessness on the one hand and a transcendent ground of meaningfulness on the other (ibid.).

YOU KNOW WHERE I STAND.

Yes we do. But with all due respect, "this seems to be to be a very odd position in which to rest":

For it means that we can hope to receive answers to every conceivable question about the world and human life which our innate curiosity can suggest to us except the final and ultimate question, the question on which everything else depends, namely, why is there a world at all and what does human life ultimately mean? 

In other words, you -- the universe -- expect us to believe that you are thoroughly intelligible and yet ultimately unintelligible. Does this make sense to you? That your very sense is nonsense?

WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY...

It is not our knowledge that sometimes makes us feel superior, but the quality of our ignorance compared to others’ knowledge.

 In other words, we at least know that we don't know. Unlike you.

We advise anyone who goes hunting for a precise explanation of the world to invent one. So that he runs less of a risk of believing in it.

I DIDN'T ASK YOU.

Our most urgent task is that of reconstructing the mystery of the world.

YES, SO LONG AS YOU REMEMBER THAT IT IS I THAT PRODUCED YOU, NOT VICE VERSA. 

Ethics is the first step in the descacralization of the universe.

MEANING WHAT, EXACTLY?

That the IS does not account for the OUGHT. Supposing we ought to believe that you are a self-sufficient explanation, why ought we believe it? For

When the fool learns that the proofs for the existence of God are invalid he automatically thinks that those for the existence of the world are valid.

I AM MY OWN PROOF.

Let's see you try to prove it and not descend into tautology. For we have a saying around here, that

If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is. 

THAT IS THE LAW: WHAT IS, IS.

If laws of history existed, their discovery would abrogate them.

YOU'VE CAUGHT ME OFF GUARD. LET ME THINK ABOUT THAT ONE.

While you're thinking about that one, consider this:

The tacit presuppositions of any science are more important than its teachings. Only what a science ignores about itself defines what it says.

And probably the most important thing that science ignores is Gödel: that a science can be complete or consistent, but never both. It seems that irony is baked into the cosmic cake, and that

Even our favorite ideas soon bore us if we do not hear them expressed with irony, with grace and with beauty.

One out of three isn't bad. Conversely,  

God is the region that one who walks forward finally reaches. One who does not walk in circles.

So, up and out of the intra-cosmic absurcularity. To be continued... 

Interview with a Universe

God is the term we use to notify the universe that it is not everything. --Dávila

Hello there universe! Consider yourself notified. Under subpoena, so to speak. You have the right to remain silent, but anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of Bob. But be careful --

I AM IMPORTANT! NOT LIKE EVERYONE SAYS... LIKE ABSURD... I'M IMPORTANT AND I WANT RESPECT!

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

Therefore you are appearance.

I DID NOT SAY THAT.

Oh, but you did. You can't even explain the existence of yourself, much less everything.

I AM EVERYTHING.  

Nothing is that simple, let alone everything. 

COME NOW. BE LOGICAL.

One word: Gödel.

ABSURD! 

Touched a nerve, eh? 

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence. 

SUCKS FOR YOU, BUT I AM NOT A MAN.

I thought you were everything.

SILENT!

God is the guest of silence.

THEN STFU!

He who does not believe in God can at least have the decency of not believing in himself.

IT IS NOT A MATTER OF BELIEF! 

Either God or Chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

YOU ARE IN ERROR: I AM NECESSITY ITSELF!

If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist. Error supposes that something happened that should not have.

Therefore, if I am wrong I am right.

SOPHISTRY! YOU ARE IN ERROR.

To admit the the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.  

YOUR SO-CALLED FREE WILL IS AN ILLUSION!

Stop yelling.

He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain. 

OKAY, I WILL MAKE AN EXCEPTION. YOU ARE FREE. SO WHAT?

The free act is only conceivable in a created universe. In the universe that results from a free act.

A WISE GUY, EH? MATTER RULES!

The stone is right, wherever it falls. Whoever speaks of error postulates free actions. 

YOU ARE TRYING MY PATIENCE.

The determinist is impatient with his opponents, as if they had the freedom to speak as they wished to. Determinists are very irritable people. 

CALMER THAN YOU, DUDE. YOU ARE PRESUMPTUOUS.

To speak of God is presumptuous; not to speak of God is imbecilic.  

WHO ARE YOU TO CALL ME AN IMBECILE? DISGUSTING WORLDLING.

God is the transcendental condition of our disgust. 

WORD GAMES.

Because he does not understand the objection that refutes him the fool thinks he has been corroborated. 

AD HOMINEM. OR AD UNIVERSEM, AT ANY RATE. HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF A LOGICAL FALLACY? BESIDES, SCIENCE!

Why deceive ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question. 

DEFINE IMPORTANT.

Of what is important there are no proofs, only testimonies.

IRRATIONAL!

"Irrationalist" is shouted at the reason that does not keep quiet about the vices of rationalism.

MYSTAGOGY!

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

YOU SPEAK OF TRANSCENDENCE, WHEN THERE CAN BE NO SUCH THING.

Scraping the painting, we do not find the meaning of the picture, only a blank and mute canvas, Equally, it is not in scratching nature that we will find its sense.

I GIVE UP.

As do I.

God does not ask for the submission of intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission.

I REPEAT: I AM EVERYTHING. YOU ARE NOTHING. 

Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing.

We'll give you the final word: let us stipulate that in the absence of God, the universe is, and must be, absurd.

the absurdists have given vivid expression to one truth of supreme importance, that the world does not make sense of itself (Mascall). 

And that Wittgenstein is correct:

In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists -- and if it did, it would have no value...

Therefore, 

The sense of the world must lie outside the world.  

YOU ARE TWISTING MY WORDS!

Now you've opened a whole new can of words, but we're out of time.

How to Build a Better Bob

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes but intertwined threads. --Dávila

If being precedes action -- which it must, because we must first exist in order to accomplish anything -- then

The Christian should be defined not in terms of what he himself does, but of what God has made him to be. Being a Christian is an ontological fact, resulting from an act of God (Mascall). 

Like a news species or something?

"If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature," and "there is a new creation." 

For real? This reminds me of the title of a post from way back -- something about natural selection and supernatural election. Again, the former only gets us so far -- essentially to a primate capable of hosting a human soul that by definition could not be produced by any amount of genetic shuffling. 

Rather, as mentioned a couple of posts ago, this is a "taking up" of the lower into the higher:

When, in the course of biological evolution some sub-human creature received from the Creator that spiritual soul which made him the first man.... we do not suppose that some sub-human element had to be removed to make room for it.

Rather, it is very much as if the sub-human was assumed into the human.... In other words, not "by the conversion of spirit into ape, but by the taking up of apehood into spirit."

Perhaps we could take this principle all the way down -- for example, biology isn't just an extremely unlikely arrangement of physics, rather, the taking up of insentient matter into Life. You could also say that the first nucleated cell was the taking up of prokaryotes into eukaryotes, or warmblooded animals the taking up of the reptilian into the mammalian.

Here again, as noted in that previous post, each of these things occurs without any destruction in the process. For example, look at our brains: a reptile wrapped in a mammalian mystery inside the enigma of a human neocortex. Moreover, McGilchrist reminds us that the left-right organization goes all the way down. 

So, No Destruction in the Process(es). And yet, Some Disassembly Required, as I put it in the book. For example, post-baptism I look about the same, or maybe a little younger. But they say baptism is both a rebirth and a death -- we die and are reborn "in Christ." 

The Cosmic bar mitzvah.

Good point. What happens in a bar mitzvah? Does it signify an ontological change, or is it just a way to get parents off the hook for the child's transgressions? 

A quick google search indicates that the ceremony not only marks "a child’s new intellectual and moral capabilities," but denotes full "entry of the holy soul in man."

In this sense the day of the Bar Mitzvah is his true birthday, the day on which he becomes a true emissary of G‑d charged with fulfilling the commandments. The word mitzvah in addition to meaning a commandment also has the meaning “connection.” It therefore follows that on the day of Bar Mitzvah, a true connection with G‑d has been established.

So, a real ontological change in the substance.

As for Christianity,

the basis of this ontological change by which a man becomes a Christian is the permanence of the human nature of Christ.... Becoming a Christian means being re-created by being incorporated into the glorified manhood of the ascended Christ (Mascall).

Well, good. Back to the question of supernatural election, "It is not just a matter of re-created men, but of a re-created human race."

Hmm. A new species, only one not brought about by natural selection? One doesn't have to be familiar with the lives of many saints to appreciate that they are as if a "new species" of man. In many ways, they are as different from fallen man as man is to the ape -- again, with no destruction, since grace only perfects nature. 

Arrogant? Presumptuous? Nah:

Nothing is as petty as not admitting how many people we encounter are superior to us. Inequality is an experience of the well-bred soul.

Conversely, equity is the doctrine of the ill-bred and soulless. Thus, the 

The noble one is not the one who thinks he has inferiors, but the one who knows he has superiors.

And respecting our superiors is above all a proof of good taste.  

Ultimately,

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.

 Noted.

The question is, does man's nature "become supernaturalized, first in its essence, then, as man cooperates with grace, in its operations as well?" If being is prior to doing, then signs point to Yes, but let's keep flippin'. 

in baptism there is is a real supernaturalization of our human nature in its essence, which can result, if we co-operate with the grace of God, in a progressive supernaturalization of its operations and in the manifestation of supernatural virtues.

Progressivism, the real kind:

The soul is the task of man.

Orthoparadox: "the Christian is, in one sense, successively becoming what, in another sense, he already is." Like, say, Bob, only better. 

His life as a citizen of Earth continues, but he has a new and greater citizenship in Heaven.

So, we're vertical migrants, as it were? 

man is by nature a similitude of God, albeit an imperfect one, which grace will make perfect by transforming him, so to say, into his true self; the Christian life is a progressive transfiguration into the likeness of God, a realization of the eternal in time, and of the spiritual in the sensible, a transforming illumination of human nature. 

Sign me up!

Being & Doing, Necessary & Sufficient, Incarnation & Atonement

Even if he wanted to, God couldn't exactly "come down," since "heaven is not a 'place,' whereas earth is; or, if heaven is a place, it is one of a very different kind from earth" (Mascall). God can't go anywhere, because he's already there.

Hmm. He's got a point. How are we to think of this? "The 'descent' which we observe is relative not to heaven but to us" (emphasis mine). 

Perhaps it's analogous to how it appears from our perspective that the sun revolves around the earth: just as the sun doesn't ascend or descend, nor does God.

Thus, it is literally accurate to say that we can ascend, but a kind of convention to say that God descends (emphasis mine). 

And why does this matter, oh thrice-knowing Peltmaster?

I don't know yet, Petey. Parts of this book are rather dense with implicit meaning, so I'm just flipping one page at a time. I think Mascall is just re-emphasizing that the ↕ncarnation means we are "taken up" into Godhead, not that God himself has gone anywhere.  

The point is that

the Incarnation is not to be thought of as the compression of the divine Word within the limits of human nature but as the exaltation of human nature to the level of Godhead by its union with the Person of the divine Word.  

Besides, if not us, then who? "What more adequate instrument than a human nature could he assume?" After all, we are already the image and likeness, so there's a lot to work with. 

A few posts back we were wondering what sort of being man must be in order to be an adequate vessel for God's cosmic reclamation project, but

human nature is essentially finite and cannot itself bridge the gulf that separates the creature from Creator. But what it cannot do for itself, God can do for it.

At least in potential. That is to say, part of our standard equipment must include a "passive capacity" for this union, even if we cannot by our own exertions achieve it. 

For it seems there is a kind of barrier at the top of (↑) -- call it (⤒) -- unless God himself assumes (⤒) and removes or breaks through the blockage. 

Genesis 3 gives the image of exclusion from Eden as a flaming sword turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. Perhaps the bar at the top of (⤒) is that flaming sword, precisely. There's a way back, but we can't get there from here:

Even if he managed to make his most audacious utopias a reality, man would continue to yearn for otherworldy destinies. 

Man "is a terribly frustrated and mutilated version of what human nature is meant by God to be." In this condition we can see that there is a ceiling and a window, but is there a door? Yes, but it is locked from the inside.

 I am the door.

Who said that?! 

the ultimate purpose of the Incarnation is not just the re-creation of human nature in Jesus, but the re-creation of the whole human race into him.

There is Incarnation on the one hand, Atonement on the other, and it seems that the first is a necessary condition for the second; Jesus must first be in order to do. Do what? Atone. If we're on the right track, then Atonement must be the final removal of (⤒). Incarnation includes the assumption of our (⤒), and its transcendence.   

If the human race needed only to be restored in one concrete instance, then there would be no need of the Crucifixion.... [Jesus] has, in his own person but in [our] place, as the representative man, to reverse [our] sin. He has to meet the enemy which defeated [us] and defeat him.

Is there no other way? 

Christ "challenged and overcame the very forces to which man had succumbed.... For only God can pay the debt which man owes, and yet it must be paid in the person of man."

And only God can overcome man's ancient enemy, while the battle must be none the less fought in human nature, since its fruits are to be communicated to men.

I for one don't like it. It's not the religion I would invent. Too crude and barbarous for my delicate sensibilities. But it's not my call to make:

Christ has overcome the powers which enthrall us though they never enthralled him.... Since Christ is the universal man, his payment of our debt and victory over our foes were in actual fact our re-creation, even though the fruits of that re-creation can be produced only as, by grace, we live in him.

I don't know. You'll have to convince me. I'm still a little

Deep faith is only that of the skeptic who prays.

And the prayer is something like: God, help me become the person you intended for me to be. 

Mascall writes that 

Because the human nature of Christ is both assumed by him and sacrificed for us, the fruits of the sacrifice can be ours through incorporation into him. But this will be the subject of the next chapter (emphasis mine).

Okay. We've waited this long. We can wait another 24 hours.

The Incarnation and You: What You Need to Know

Warning: Pedantry Ahead. It can't be helped, as it lays a foundation for the fun to follow.

We've been drawing from an excellent little tome called The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys, by Andrew Louth. Plotinus is the last pagan discussed before moving on to Origen, the first Christian covered in the book. For Origen, "the soul's ascent to God" -- AKA (↑) --

begins, or is made possible, by what God has done for us in Christ.... The mystical life is the working-out, the realizing, of Christ's union with the soul effected in baptism, and is a communion, a dialogue, between Christ and the soul.

We might call this dia-logos (↑↓). Now, Plotinus was able to ascend pretty, pretty far via (↑) alone. Problem is, he wasn't able to take Plotinus with him, as union with O meant the extinction of himself. D'oh! 

Switching over to a book on the Incarnation and its consequences, Mascall echoes Origen, writing that "sanctification is the progressive realization" of "the change that was made in the ontological realm by baptism."

In other words, baptism entails an actual change in reality. I want to say that the Incarnation is the necessary condition for the possibility of this transformation, but that we remain sufficient conditions -- i.e., we must choose to participate in the ongoing real-ization of this realchange. 

To express it in abstract terms, while the Incarnation provides the (↓) that has forever joined heaven and earth, we nevertheless must exert our own (↑) to facilitate the return. Christ has done the heavy lifting, but this doesn't mean we don't do any lifting at all (at least in orthodox theology). 

In this regard, it is important to emphasize the fact that Christ is actually both --  (↓) and (↑) -- but that we may hitch a ride on the vertical winds of the latter, so to speak, via insertion into the nonlocal body of Christ. 

This answers the wholly reasonable question of what the Incarnation -- an event that happened over two thousand years ago -- has to do with us. Again,

the Incarnation must be viewed as the taking up of manhood into God and not as the conversion of Godhead into flesh. 

Importantly, Christ cannot be a "new person," for Before Abraham was, I am. 

The Person of this human nature was not created, as in the case of all other human beings; it was the pre-existent Word or Logos.

Therefore,

we are not concerned with the production of a new person, but with the assumption of a new nature by a Person who already exists.

Big. Difference. 

The divinity of the Person is derived from his eternal generation by God the Father, in virtue of which he is, as it were, the Father's alter ego...

Yes, his yoke is easy but this is a difficult and ticksy doctrine that is easily misunderstood, especially due to the difference between Person and human being: Jesus assumes human nature while retaining his divine personhood. As such he is not -- unlike the restavus -- a human person. Again, tricksy, because he is the only human being who is not a human person.

No wonder they had to have all those early councils to work out these critical distinctions. The bottom line is that Christ is nothing less than

a new creation of manhood out of the material of the fallen human race. There is continuity with the fallen race through the manhood taken from Mary; there is discontinuity through the fact that the Person of Christ is the pre-existent Logos.

This is a Very Strange Doctrine, for which reason we once quipped that the weird became flesh, but I was wrong, because it's weirder than that. For this is 

the Creator himself becoming man and moulding human nature to the lineaments of his own Person. Christ is quite literally the Second Adam, the Man in whom the human race begins anew. 

Here again, this is the "fourth bang" to which we alluded couple posts back, the first three being Existence, Life, and (human) Consciousness. "In him human nature is made afresh" by "the uncreated and pre-existent Person of the divine Word."

As rational soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ.

Too weird, or not weird enough? 

As to the third bang, when, "in the course of biological evolution some sub-human creature received from the Creator that spiritual soul which made him the first man," we do not suppose that "some sub-human element had to be removed to make room for it."

Rather, it is very much as if the sub-human was assumed, or something, into the human. We're still primates, but of a very special sort. But where is the line between the human and infra-human? 

The whole range of animal life was caught up into the higher mode of life proper to a spiritual and rational being, yet without any destruction in the process.

In other words, not "by the conversion of spirit into ape, but by the taking up of apehood into spirit." And here we are: the monkey in the middle: "animals are imperfect beasts, man is a perfect beast."

Or perfectible, rather, for "the relation of spirit to animal in man" is analogous to "the relation of Godhood to manhood in Christ."

But only analogously. At any rate, in

the formation of the first man, there would be a lifting up into the human order of a being that already existed on the animal plane.

Whereas "we are forbidden to suppose that the Word assumed to himself an already existing man."

For "What was assumed into God was not a man but manhood." And that makes all the (big) difference. 

The point is, if we appreciate the mysterious fusion of such disparate elements in ourselves -- of matter, ape, and human -- it shouldn't be such a leap to wrap our minds around "the union of Godhead and manhood in the one Christ."

"The question isn't whether it it is easy, but whether it is possible." I'm going with possible. It is not possible for man to become God, but it is certainly not impossible for man to be assumed into God, since we know damn well that once upon a timeless animality was assumed into humanness.

Grow with the Flow

A vision of the world outside of which a religious vocabulary is meaningless. It occurs to me that a list of philosophic non-starters converges with a vision of the world in which religion makes no sense. 

Which is another way of saying that there can be no real conflict between science, philosophy, and religion, because it is always One Cosmos hence one God, one reality, one truth, one human nature, et al.  

But it's not just religion that is rendered meaningless as a result of such metaphysical deformations and pneumapathologies; supposing one is a reductionist, the reduction must proceed all the way down, from psychology to biology to physics to ontological nothingness, which is to say, the Bad (pseudo) Infinite.

Conversely, a rejection of reductionism inevitably leads all the way up, unless one stops at some arbitrary point in between. For

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.

Where is the Ground? Only two possible places: below, in immanence; or above, in transcendence. Materialism or Platonism. 

Yes, but we are the mysterious monkey in the middle. We cannot actually ever reach immanence until we're dead, nor can we reach transcendence per se -- i.e., the place where all this truth and beauty comes from.

So we live in the Tension, and I suppose it's tempting to want to make it go away by veering toward one pole or the other. But -- speaking of visions --

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.  

Absolute insignificance. Is such a thing actually conceivable? Or is the very conception of insignificance significant, and therefore a performative contradiction?  

Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other. 

Truly truly, it comes down to O or Ø, and everything else is, and must be, a disguise for one or the other. 

Now, bear in mind that we are coming at this from the purely philosophical side, not the properly theological; that is, we are sketching a metaphysic in which it will be possible for religion to later make sense. Therefore, from our side, we would say that God is a consequence of O, even though, once we arrive at God, then we would have to say that the relation is reversed.

What do you mean, Bob?

What I mean is that we can only get so far from our end, and that if our abstract conception of O is to have any concrete meaning and experiential content, it will have to be provided by God. To take an obvious example, no one ever, on his own, arrived at the notion of Trinity as the ultimate ground.

Oh? You think so? Lao Tse would like a word:

The Tao gives birth to One. / One gives birth to Two. / Two gives birth to Three. / Three gives birth to all things.

Now, I call that a pretty, pretty good guess. There are also "echoes of a doctrine of the Trinity in Vedic Hinduism," for in "the conception of God as satchitananda," Sat corresponds to "the absolute existence of the Father, Chit to the Logos, and Ananda to the Holy Comforter" (Varghese).

And yesterday we spoke of Plotinus' trinity, and of how the One overflows into existence and returns to Itself. Of course, Christianity rejects such emanationism, because it seemingly denies the doctrine of creation as a free act of God. It's a gift, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it but be thankful. 

Nevertheless, once we get to the Godside of things, it isn't difficult to harmonize divine creativity and emanation, for example, in Echkart, whose characterization of the divine overflow is very much in line with Plotinus. 

We could write a whole post on his "metaphysics of the flow," but we don't have to, since McGinn has already done so in chapter 5 of his The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: he posits a 

dynamic reciprocity of the "flowing forth" of all things from the hidden ground of God, and the "flowing back," or "breaking through," of the universe into essential identity with this divine source.

This chapter is 34 pages long, so dwelling on it would consume the remainder of our timelessness together. Instead, let's focus on what he says about the Trinity: "The Son is the 'Principle from the Principle,' the Father is the 'Principle without Principle,'" and the Holy Spirit is the "nexus, or bond, of Father and Son," and therefore "the ground of our return to the source."

Being is God's circle and in this circle all creatures exist.

Just as God breaks through me, so do I break through God in return (Eckhart).

Aaaaand here we are, trying to break on through to the other side because God has already broken through to our side. 

Let's get back to Plotinus, who, in coming at things from our side, posited an eternal cosmos. Not his fault of course, since he knew nothing of the revelations of modern physical cosmology. He was enclosed in circularity, but at least his was a rather largish circle:

A favorite analogy is the One as the center of a circle, containing potentially all the circles that can emanate from it. In this analogy, Intelligence is the circle with the One at its center, and Soul such a circle revolving around the One.

Not bad, not bad at all. It reminds us of what Schuon says in the comment box, that

Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite.

Louth expands upon this:

The furthest limit of the One's emanation is matter, which is on the brink, as it were, of being and non-being.

Thus, materialism as such is an anti-intellectual doctrine of nothingness, of a radical absurdity that no one actually believes, just an atheistic fairy tale and opium for the tenured. It's a vision alright, but a vision that can't even account for sight. Let those with third eyes open see! For

Everything desires to return to the One, to return to the fulness of being to which it is an outflow.... all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end...

Or to hell with it. 

As the soul ascends to the One, it enters more deeply into itself.... Self-knowledge and knowledge of the ultimate are bound up together, if not identified.

Bound up together, in the most intimate way imaginable, in the Incarnation, but that's a subject for the next installment. 

Introduction to a Vision of the Possibility of Religious Meaning

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless.

In other words, we need what amounts to a "pre-religious" vision of the world, into which religion can then be possibly fitted. 

Why do we need that, Bob?

Shut up Dupree. You're out of your element.

Isn't such a vision already religious? No, not necessarily. For example, there is nature mysticism, nor did Buddha need no steenking deity. Likewise Plotinus, who, come to think of it, had an excellent preconceptual paradigm that could later be re-purposed for Christianity by the likes of St. Augustine.

Plotinus is more than  an episode in our passage from Plato to the Fathers. In him we find the supreme exponent of an abiding element in what we might call "mystical philosophy." He represents man's inherent desire to return to heaven at its purest and most ineffable (Andrew Louth).

Here again, the use of the term "heaven" already hints at a religious vision. Instead, what if we focus on the inherent desire, which is obviously vertical and unique to man? Unless one is prejudiced against religion, or simply came into the world with what amounts to vertical autism, we can all agree that this restless desire exists, for we can find no culture in which it is absent. 

This is what we call (↑).

True, in the past century or more there have been cultures that have systematically attempted to suppress, deny, and/or redirect (↑), most obviously in communism and Nazism, but also increasingly in our own culture. Indeed, it is one of the defining differences in our uncivil war, as illustrated in the following graph:

The gap between the two is a measure of the tension between us and them -- or between upright (↑) folk and downwrong (⇆) folkers. 

Plotinus at once represents a convergence of "eight hundred years of Greek speculation," from which "issues a new current destined to fertilize" -- we can't help saying vertilize -- "minds as different as those of Augustine and Boethius, Dante and Meister Eckhart, Coleridge, Bergson and T.S. Eliot," vertilized visionaries one and all.

So, let's stipulate that the religious vocabulary to which the Aphorist alludes is necessarily meaningless in the absence of (↑). And even then, the question comes down to the ontological status of (↑) -- both whether it, and the object to which it points, are Real.

Are they?

Too soon to tell. At this point were still outlining our methodological introduction. Could be that we are enclosed in immanence, so (↑) is just circular -- an existential tautology, so to speak. It doesn't rhyme with reality but just stutters and stammers with opinions about it.

If that's the case, then we have to disregard the experiential visions of thousands of mystics who have journeyed to the toppermost of the poppermost and back. Of course, they could be delusional or deceptive, liar or lunatics.

So, who you gonna believe? The corner atheist or the dazzlingly self-evident testimony of your own experience?

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

The objectivity of mystical experience cannot be demonstrated. Just like that of any experience.

The mystic is the only one who is seriously ambitious. 

Experience. What is that? What is it like? It's not like anything, for there is nothing to which it can be compared, and anything to which we compare it presumes its existence.

So, the larger question is, is experience sealed in the absurcularity of immanence -- (⇆) -- or does it furnish a kind of window into transcendence?

While thinking about that, let's sketch Plotinus' vision and see where it leads. I mean, we know it leads down to such vertical luminaries as Dante, Eliot, and Eckhart, but let's not prejudge the case. There are rules. 

Plotinus' hierarchy is expressed in terms of three principles.... Beginning with the highest, these are the One or the Good; Intelligence, nous; and Soul, psyche. Soul is the level of life as we know it, the realm of sense-perception.... Beyond this, there is the more unified realm of Intelligence, nous.

Let's try to render this in a more abstract and unsaturated form: for the One, let us call it O; for the soul, let us call it (¶); and for intellection -- the link between -- let us call it (↑). 

Turns out we can say a great deal with just these three pneumaticons. Equally important, there is a great deal we can never say if we try to exclude any one of them up front. 

For example, with the preconceptual principle of (↑), "knower and known are one" -- any knower and any known, for knowledge per se is already transcendent; to merely affirm that man is a knower is already to know a great deal indeed. 

Let's talk about O. What is the least we can we say of it? It must be "absolutely simple, beyond any duality whatsoever." In this context, simple does not mean "simplistic," rather, composed of no parts, eternally abiding in itself. 

It is the One, because beyond duality; it is the Good, because it has no need of anything else. It is the source of all, it is beyond being. Nothing can be affirmed of the One: "we must be patient with language.... everywhere we must read so to speak."

Now, assuming transcendence, it seems that (↑) is really (↕), which implies the immanent drive at one end, the transcendental attractor at the other; for our three terms -- O, (↕), and (¶) --

are related by processes Plotinus calls emanation and return. Intelligence emanates from the One, and Soul from Intelligence: out of the utterly simple there comes multiplicity, and that multiplicity is further diversified and broken up at the level of discursive understanding. 

This process of emanation is a process of "overflowing," the potent simplicity of the One "overflows" into Intelligence, and Intelligence overflows into the soul. Emanation is met by return. Emanation is the One's unfolding its simplicity: Return is the Good's drawing everything to itself. Everything strives for the Good, longs to return to the Good: and this is Return.

Not a bad start to the vision we're seeking. Nor is it difficult to Bobtize this vision. The question is whether it can be baptized. I think so, but that's enough for this morning.

Incarnation: The Fourth and Biggest Bang

I'm a little fuzzy this morning, because I woke up too early. There's some extracurricular excitement going on in the Cosmos, in that my mother-in-law is visiting, and we're having a little party for her 90th. What with all the activity, my focus is not what it could be and should be, and not even the ZYN is helping. We'll do our best and try to regroup tomorrow.

We're switching books, but still on the subject of Cosmic and Theological Anthropology. Of course, we could just bottomline it with a brief aphorism and be done for the day:

Truth is a person. 

Bang. That is my suspicion as well, and the Incarnation only makes me more suspicious. 

To back up, we're still mediating on John Paul's observation that man is forever a mystery to himself absent the Incarnation, and Ratzinger's statement about the truly revolutionary consequences of a trinitarian metaphysic -- i.e., of relationship elevated to the same level as substance. 

Not only is Personhood the first and last Truth -- the Alpha and Omega -- of all our searching, this Truth explains a great deal that cannot be otherwise explained. Does it unexplain anything important -- for example, any scientific finding? Nah. Science doesn't explain persons, rather, the other way around. I don't need to remind you that

To believe science is enough is the most naive of superstitions.

That

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.

And that

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

Well, I'm here to say that it is more than okay to start at the top, with persons. In fact, it's mandatory

Indeed, people spontaneously recognize this, even if they pretend not to. After all, no metaphysical Darwinian actually lives as one, nor does any materialist, because doing so would no longer be a human life. True, there is obviously an animal component, but it is a humanized animality, or animality refracted through the reality of human personhood. 

Come to think of it, I was going to use our animal-human fusion as an analogy to the Christ-human fusion. Might as well do so now. 

You know what they say about Christ's yoke -- that it's easy -- but not if we want to philosophize about it and integrate it with everything else we know about the Cosmos. That's a little tricksy, in that our quest is surrounded by heresies on all sides. Some of these are superficially more plausible than the truth, hence the perennial attraction. 

I am reminded of another aphorism:

Properly speaking, the social sciences are not inexact sciences, but sciences of the inexact.

And if we are on the right track, theology turns out to be the last word in social science, since God turns out to be nothing less than a society of persons.

Let's begin with a recurring principle and theme that pops up throughout the book we're discussing (Christ, the Christian, and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and its Consequences by philosopher and theologian Eric Mascall), that

the Incarnation must be viewed as the taking up of manhood into God and not as the conversion of Godhead into flesh. 

Again, that's an easy yoke, since God has already down the heavy lifting -- i.e., lifting man to a participation in the divine life. But how, exactly? For example, this presupposes that man must already be the type of being for whom this is possible -- that "human nature is an adequate medium for this purpose." And

if the doctrine of the re-creation of man in Christ is mysterious, it is no more so than is the nature of man himself.

For -- you have noticed -- "man is himself a very strange being," and we can only pretend to make the strangeness go away via theories and ideologies from our end. 

The problem is, there is nothing else in creation to which man can be compared without losing something vital in the comparison. True, we are like lower primates, but there is nevertheless a (literally) infinite gap between us and them. 

The continuity is easy enough to explain. But whither the ontological discontinuity? That's not supposed to happen in natural selection, but Here We Are. 

Let's think about our undeniable animality. Where is the "line" between it an our human personhood? Somehow, "in the course of biological evolution some sub-human creature received from the Creator that spiritual soul which made him the first man," and boom,

The whole range of animal life was caught up into a higher mode of life proper to a spiritual and rational being, yet without any destruction in the process.

In other words, there was no need to eradicate the ape in order to make room for the man, rather, humanness is more like "the taking of apehood into spirit" which rhymes (ontologically) with Christ's "taking up of manhood into God" alluded to above. 

In short, the latter is analogous to "the formation of the first man," whereby man is "lifted up," so to speak "into the human order" of "a being that already existed on the animal plane." In terms of cosmic evolution, man is to ape as Christ is to man?

Once upon a time -- in the book -- I described hominization it as no less than another Big Bang, only

into a subjective space that was somehow awaiting the primate brains that had to learn to navigate, colonize, and eventually master it. 

Just as the first singularity was an explosion into (and simultaneously creation of) material space-time, and the second singularity a discontinuous "big bang" into the morphic space of biological possibility, this third singularity was an implosion into a trans-dimensional subjective space refracted through the unlikely lens of a primate brain.   

I still say that's what happened, nor can it ever be explained via any "bottom up" metaphysic, rather, only from the top-down.

What I did not say in the book is that the Incarnation and man's subsequent "Christification" are the fourth Big Bang, which is to say, after the first three into matter, life, and mind.

Back to the third big bang, natural selection -- which governs the second bang -- 

did not, and could not have, "programmed" us to know reality, only to survive in a narrow reality tunnel constructed within the dialectical space between the world of phenomena and our evolved senses.

But suddenly, about 40,000 years ago, mind crossed a boundary into a realm wholly its own, a multidimensional landscape unmappable by [material or biological] science and unexplainable by natural selection. 

The point is, hominization is a "break with nature caused by the unexpected dawning of self-consciousness that vaulted Homo sapiens into this subjective world space."

All we're saying is that, considering this overall scheme, the Incarnation is the Fourth Bang. The last and biggest Bang of all. 

Like I said, I'll clean it up tomorrow.

Make the Cosmos Great Again

Picking right up where we left off,  the rise of secularism has resulted in the transition "from living in a cosmos to being included in a universe," the former an enchanted hierarchy teeming with life and intelligence, the latter a skeletal and bloodless math lesson given by infertile eggheads. 

For our purposes, the Cosmos is an open system, the Universe a closed one. These are the only two options, so think before you choose. 

One of the most consequential differences between the two is that any form of ultimate meaning is strictly impossible in the the case of the purely immanent and closed Universe. 

In the enchanted world, meaning exists outside of us, is ours to receive. In the disenchanted world, the self is buffered; suddenly we feel ourselves to be "master of the meanings of things," we give our "autonomous order to life."

Ironically, the inhabitant of the enchanted world is more in touch with the Real than is the unhappitant of the disenchanted -- that is, supposing this is an open Cosmos.  

So many aphorisms go to this binary choice that we could get seriously bogged down in the pleasure of contemplating them, so I'll bottomline it with a single ironyclad zinger: 

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

But to even say "appearance" is to say "reality," or to hell with it. And the first man who looked around in astoneagement and cried WTF! -- which is to say, the first man -- knew this distinction. It is secular man who has forgotten it, whereas we remumble it every morning -- 5,508,849 words so far, but who's counting?

Of course, we don't intend to idealize our furbears, but Schuon has a choice passage on what It was like for them:

The whole existence of the peoples of antiquity, and of traditional peoples in general, is dominated by two key-ideas, the idea of Center and the idea of Origin.

The "space" of the Center "is the place where Heaven has touched the earth," whereas the Origin "is the quasi-timeless moment when Heaven was near and terrestrial things were still half-celestial." For example, in Genesis, Eden is this place. We'll have much more to say about this later on down.

In my view we can turn the whole meaning thing downside-up and outside-in, and construct the following syllogism: 

If there is no meaning, then there is no God.

But there is meaning.

Therefore God.  

Simple as, but we need to put some flesh on those bones, but how? I know -- Let Us incarnate as one of these fleshlings! Here again, I'll explain later. Right now I just want to finish the last chapter in this book on Theological Anthropology. 

Hmm. To be expelled from Eden is in a way to be alienated from the Center and to be more or less distant from the Origin. More generally, Revelation conveys a -- the -- Metaphysic. You're free to reject it, but

The result has been that, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, each individual has felt a compulsion to "discover their own fulfillment."

As if to say, invent our own Center and Origin. 

the effect of this compulsion is is a radical fragmentation of meaning, or hyperpluralism.... "We are now living in a spiritual super-nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane."

I like that image of a super-nova, which is a star that implodes on itself and scatters the fragments farandwide -- far from Origin and Wide of the Center.

So many banged up and thunder-sundered images of the One, a vidy long descent indeed to the farthest reaches of sorrow and ignorance!

Yes, Petey, that's about the sighs of it, a

mutual fragilization, this being when "the many forms of belief and unbelief jostle," and one's increasingly idiosyncratic beliefs are implicitly challenged and potentially re-shaped or strengthened by the contest with others.

A war of each against all in the struggle for Meaning. But here again, it is a meaning enclosed in subjectivity and particularity, thus an intracosmic bogosity on stilts, everyone residing in his own private Idaho.

Make the Cosmos Great Again!

We'll try.

Better yet, we give up, because the whole effort to to do this is a more or less elaborate soph-deception. Obviously. For if every man is his own center, there is no Celestial Central, only the terrestrial periphery.

Instead, we must stop fleeing the Center, commit metanoia, and peacefully turn ourselves into the authorities -- the Author-ities of our being. For if we do not "share an overall vision of the real," then "the only alternative" is "a growing subjectivism" mired in incoherence and mutual incomprehension. Postmodernity, good and hard.

We're talking about nothing less than an "all-embracing tradition of wisdom fed by the Divine Logos," and why not? 

"Things have their intelligibility, their inner clarity and lucidity, and the power to reveal themselves because God has creatively thought them." 

As such, "our thinking is just a re-thinking; it is literally re-cognizing. Thus, it may be said that thinking can only be the act of a receptive creature" (emphasis mine). Or again -- you guessed it -- to hell with it.

Hell is the place where man finds all his projects realized.

This goes to the same binary stance alluded to in the second paragraph above, for "when the intellect is the norm and measure of things, then truth [which is no Truth at all] consists in the equation of things to the intellect" -- i.e., your truth and my truth, but no Truth as such, AKA the absurcular road to and from Kantville. 

Such an impoverished and ultimately tautologous creature "prefers itself in the role of creator who thinks things into being."

Conversely, the "good life" is 

"lived in contemplative assent to the world" which we have received.... such a view is at odds with living as "master of the meanings of things."

"In contrast, the secular mindset seeks satisfaction in fragments," which reminds us of an aphorism:

Philosophy ultimately fails because one has to speak of the whole in terms of its parts. 

Unless there's some kind of cosmic workaround, whereby, say, the Whole becomes one of the parts; or better yet, the part is somehow "taken up" into the Whole. Which provides a good diving board for the next post, so we'll end with this:

To be a creature means to be continually receiving being and essence from the divine Source and Creator, and in this respect, therefore, never to be finally completed. 

Still a lotta ins & outs, but for now we'll just relux and call it a deity, and fill in the threetales tomorrow.