Creation is a Gift, and There's Not a Damn Thing We Can Do About It

I'm reading a book that's pulling together a lot of loose strands of the cosmic area rug, called Heart of the World, Center of the Church, by David Schindler. I don't remember how he appeared on my radar, but he is helping me see some things on a deeper and more unified level. (Very turgid, however -- can't make a general recommendation.)

Among other things, the book is a critique of liberalism, not just the fake and malevolent liberalism of the left, but the real liberalism of American conservatism. Not a condemnation of the latter, mind you, just an acknowledgement of its limitations, or better, its inherent contradictions if separated from the Christian metaphysic that first animated it.

Here is a provocative statement, but it is the key to understanding what's going on in Indiana, with the left's assault on religious freedom:

"The increasing nihilism of liberal culture is unmasked as fundamentally gay in character," ultimately grounded in a "non-nuptial" relation to God. In the Christian view, the soul is feminine in relation to God, as is the Church to Christ. Therefore, "the world's response to God" necessarily takes "the feminine form," otherwise spiritual infertility results.

Vis-a-vis Indiana, we see a total inversion of cosmic and constitutional reality, whereby sexual perversion is literally sacralized, whereas religion is deemed perverse. How has it come to this? (I'll address this question more directly in a subsequent post.)

Schindler writes of how the "marian fiat" -- the primordial Yes to God -- is "the primary or originating act that serves as the ground of all Christian life and action." Mary's "'emptiness' and her humility [o] are what make it possible for her soul to magnify -- not herself, but the Lord."

Thus, in terms of Christian anthropology, "human freedom is receptive freedom before it is creative freedom -- or better, is a freedom that becomes authentically creative only by being anteriorly receptive." This is another way of saying that (↓) is always prior to (↑) in the transnatural cosmic spiral. Which should be obvious, or not even Darwin could get off the evolutionary ground.

You might say that (↓) is pure Gift. It is given to us, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Except give it back, "by generously extending to others what has first been given and what we have always-already first received. All that is, is gift." We "gratefully receive from God," and "this provides both the warrant for the deepest meaning of [our] giving to others." This is nothing less than the "soul's magnification of the Lord and of the riches of his creation."

Now, it goes a little deeper than this, because even more than "giver," God is gift per se; or, one might say that he is irreducibly giver-gift-recipient (or love-generosity-gratitude), each always implying the other.

Conversely, the left always wants to force the giving, which of course isn't giving at all, if only because it is predicated on taking from someone else. But more insidiously, the faux-giving is just a pretext for the usurpation of force. We see this playing out in Indiana: the left doesn't really want to "give" anything to homosexuals, rather, just use the force of the state to suppress our constitutional (and before that, natural) right to freedom of religion. Obviously there can be no natural right to what is by any definition unnatural.

The creation, being a reflection of God, is gift. One might say that the gift is simply the objectification of love. Thus, for Schindler, in "the basic structure of the cosmos, logos and love are convertible."

This is why creation "opens out" to the intellect, just as the intellect is receptive to the creation. "Simply stated, meaning and intelligibility presuppose God," such that "if God goes, so go the foundations of meaning." This is the very basis of science -- and all the further gifts it brings. Or, try engaging in science with a passive-aggressive cosmos that refuses to share its secrets!

"Intelligibility -- identifiable meaning -- does not, and cannot, outlive God. Rather, following the death of God, we stray 'as through an infinite nothing.'"

The other day, Taranto linked to this thread at Reddit on the pointlessness of life. Yes, these are deranged liberals who have strayed through the infinite nothing, but one can at least admire their honesty:

"What's the point?... Happiness? Pleasure? Why would I want happiness? Why would I want others to be happy? Why should I care about other people? Why should I care about myself? Happiness is just an illusion, free will is an illusion, pleasure is an illusion, love is an illusion, sadness is an illusion, fear is an illusion, suffering is an illusion, and we are just a bunch of atoms trying to maximize entropy.

"Nothing has intrinsic meaning nor value. If the only way to create your own meaning and value is based on your own happiness, how can I create my own value knowing that emotions are just an evolutionary biological illusions to keep us running on the treadmill of life to maximize our chance to pass down our gene pool?"

Given this premise, the conclusion follows ineluctably: "And now I have very little motivation to keep studying or doing anything."

A commenter responds "I think the exact same way.... Everything just seems pointless to me, we live a life trying to achieve happiness only to die. I just don't see the point."

Interestingly, the poster ticks off all of his liberal dreams but sadly concludes that "there is a chance that I'm going to die before I can do and see all of of those things, and all the hard work is going to be for nothing. So I come to this world, struggle for imaginary happiness and die. What's the point?"

This is a transparent reflection of the left's always-futile attempt to immanentize Christian eschatological hope. When you realize you've founded your life on an illusion, it is depressing.

Note that the unconscious assumption of the leftist is that somehow he will become happy and fulfilled if he forces the rest of us to be happy on his terms. I say, why not skip the middleman -- the coercive state -- and just be happy? If you can't make yourself happy, then what makes you think the state can by proxy?

Besides, my happiness won't really make you happy. Rather, only more envious.

Looking for God Between the Syntactical Trees and the Semantic Forest

Or, between words and meaning; or more generally, symbols and symbolized. Consider: "It is possible to know every word in the dictionary," "and yet be unable to write a living sentence, or even respond to the life in the writing of other men" (Sheed).

The trouble is, every word has a particular meaning, but this meaning must be subordinated to the meaning of the sentence -- and then sentence to paragraph, paragraph to chapter, chapter to narrative, etc.

I remember once reading in a Scientology pamphlet of L. Ron Hubbard's advice to his clones on how to approach a difficult text. To the extent that you don't understand it, just look up each unknown word in the dictionary, then put it all together. Voila! Meaning.

I've never tried the method, but it would probably be impossible even for simple sentences, because you'd just end up with more autonomous parts without getting any closer to the integral meaning.

I'm tempted to try....

Okay: "I live in a house."

To streamline this, I'll just use the first definitions.

"Someone possessing and aware of possessing a distinct personal individuality am alive -- i.e., have the life of an animal or plant -- in a location or in space or in some materially bounded object, in this case a structure intended or used for human habituation."

But then you'd have to look up possessing, distinct, individuality, materially, structure, etc. Thus, the Hubbard Method just makes things more convoluted, not easier. Plus -- like the dictionary itself -- it is ultimately tautologous. That is, words just refer to other words, in a closed logoverse. For example, my Oxford dictionary couldn't even define "in" without using the word. Ultimately you probably couldn't say a thing without literally involving the whole dictionary.

More generally, knowing the meaning of words is an entirely different function from using them well in a sentence. In fact, using them well often involves using them incorrectly. I recently read a biography of Wodehouse, in which the author wrote the following very Wodehousian sentence: "To this day, even as a peacetime museum, it broods menacingly over the tower of Huy..." If you were to deploy the Hubbard Method to deconstruct the sentence, you'd be left with the impression that inanimate buildings are subject to moods and intimidating gestures.

Wodehouse habitually tossed in bizarre personifications, e.g., As I sat in the bath tub, soaping a meditative foot and singing..., or He uncovered the fragrant eggs and b., and I pronged a moody forkful..., or Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing gloves, etc. There are hundreds if not thousands of these.

This is a long way of asking the question: how would it even be possible to understand scripture if we didn't already understand it?

A more basic problem, it seems to me, is how words -- and language more generally -- get outside themselves? Again, if words just refer to other words, then they cannot refer to God, except in the form of another word.

The short answer is of course provided by the pneumanaut with the umlaut, Gödel. He proved once and for all that any logical system contains assumptions that cannot be justified by the system. Rather, we need the assumptions to get off the semantic goround.

As we've discussed before, postmodernists completely misunderstand this to mean that there is no possibility of real meaning, but Gödel's whole point -- at least according to Goldstein -- is that there are truths that cannot be proved logically. He didn't intend to abolish truth but preserve it.

It also means that, whatever our minds are, they cannot be digital computers, because they always transcend the digits. His theorems "don't demonstrate the limits of the human mind, but rather the limits of computational models of the human mind (basically, models that reduce all thinking to rule-following)" (Goldstein).

Otherwise, Gödel's theorems would disprove Gödel's theorems. As we mentioned a couple of posts back, man breaks out of his animal form and opens out to the infinite, "beyond the circumscriptions of personal experience to gain access to aspects of reality that it is impossible to otherwise know" (ibid.).

So language, in order to get beyond itself, must be a vertically open system in which something from beyond the system is able to infuse the words with a meaning and a Life which they alone cannot convey.

Gödel -- unlike positivists at one end and deconstructionists at the other -- "is committed to the possibility of reaching out... beyond our experiences to describe the world 'out yonder.'" This yonder world is a reality "of universal and necessary truths" to which we are mysteriously -- and sometimes mythteriously -- able to gain access. As a result, we may gain "at least partial glimpses of what might be called... 'extreme reality.'"

Yesterday, out of the blue, my son surprised me by reeling off pi to eight or ten decimals. What does it mean that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is a deeply irrational number that goes on forever? The circle has always been considered the "perfect" form, so it was troubling to the ancients that pi brooded so menacingly over them.

Schuon often deployed the geometrical circle as a point of reverence to make theometrical statements about God. For example, if God is the center of the circle, we are at the periphery. Looked at this way, the center is surrounded by concentric circles corresponding to this or that worldspace, e.g., life, mind, matter, angels, archetypes, etc. Some worlds are necessarily closer to or more distant from God. Evil is way out there.

But it can also be used the other way around, such that the world is within the circle and the infinite God surrounds it (like the mysterious "man in the donut" in the sidebar).

To put an impatient kibosh on this scatterish post, "The man who does not believe in God must read Scripture differently from the man who does.... a discussion between them as to the meaning of the New Testament is as though one were discussing marriage with a eunuch" (Sheed).

One Out of Two Universes Ends in Divorce

Last week we spoke of those convenient points of reverence that sound "a note from the external senses and [resonate] throughout the interior faculties..." This receptive act "effortlessly assembles impressions and spontaneously gives a spiritual knowledge of being, a kind of song of reality" (Taylor).

So, the senses are not merely sensory but always... sensible as well: although we can distinguish sense from intellect, we cannot radically isolate the two from each other. You might say that there is always a bit of intellect in the senses, and a bit of sensation in the intellect, as in the image of the Tao. Or a kind of marriage, if you like.

Now, why is this important? Well, when we think about ultimate reality, it seems to me that "sensation" is precisely what separates outside from inside. However, it is also what unites inside and outside. Therefore, sense is like the semipermeable membrane that faces both ways, between the interior and exterior of the cosmos. You know, Janus-faced.

This is what I was attempting to convey way back in the portentously titled Book Two, via the strange phenomenon of biogenesis. For example, if it were possible to insert an observer into our cosmos prior to the emergence of life -- a logical impossibility, but go ahead anyway -- there would have been no outside nor any inside.

You might be tempted to think that it was all outside -- i.e., exterior and objective -- but outside co-arises with inside. Analogously, not only is there is no husband without a wife, but husband-and-wife instantaneously co-arise with the incantation of I Do. It's the same way with objects. There can be no objects without a subject, no one to draw any boundaries between them.

So anyway, go back to any time prior to the emergence of life, and "no amount of knowledge of physics or chemistry could have discerned the fantastic potential that only time could reveal; or have foretold the luminous fissure that was about to break open in this heretofore dark, impenetrable circle" (me).

But THE most dramatic thing about the emergence of life is that we now have a division, a boundary, a membrane, and therefore an inside and an outside. There is even the trace of a subject, as in a ME and a NOT ME. The simplest cell has some means of distinguishing ME from NOT ME, if only a physical boundary. And all senses are ultimately touch, only of more subtle things such as air vibrations or photons.

A modest thing, no doubt, but all subsequent development is rooted in this distinction. For example, where would we be without our immune system? It is our most primitive means of profiling any NOT MEs with dubious intentions, but we'd be dead without it.

Back to the emergence of this most primitive membrane that brings about a new, two-faced world: "Here, the dawning of an internal horizon in a universe now divided against itself, the unimaginable opening of a window on the world, a wondrous strange mutation as unique, mysterious, and altogether strange as our first bang into material space-time..." (me again).

So yes, Life is an explosion, as was matter before and mind after. And a few posts back we shared that line about how "[I]nfinite love has exploded into our universe; theology is an effort to diagram the explosion. The diagram is indispensable, but it is not the reality and it must not obsess us. What matters is the love, and that cannot be diagrammed" (Sheed).

But nothing can happen until we have the membrane: without it we remerge with matter, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. With it there is the ingression of freedom, truth, love, and beauty into this world. You might say that Life is the first step of transcendence, since any living organism transcends the material of which it is composed. The organism is a kind of space-time pattern through which constituent elements flow in and out.

Transcendence, as Schuon correctly observes, is "separative." You might even say that it is the source of our alienation, our awareness that this cannot be our home. Because we always transcend the world, we can never fully be in it or give ourselves to it. There is always a remainder (and a reminder). Hence Schuon's orthoparadoxical crack about how man is "condemned to transcendence."

Now, like inside and outside, there can be no transcendence without immanence: they are complementary, not opposites. But if we focus on transcendence to the exclusion of immanence, we end up -- ironically -- either an atheist or a primitive believer, i.e., like the Muslim who invests all power in the transcendent Allah and none outside him, or the atheist who lives in his scientistic abstractions.

Immanence, in contrast to transcendence, is "unitive." Without it, we have a radical duality, with all reality above and nothing below. If transcendence "fixes, immobilizes, and crystalizes us" in reverence and awe, then immanence "attracts, vivifies, and, in the final analysis, reintegrates us in keeping with 'love'" (Schuon). Thus, it is almost like Father-Transcendence and Mother-Immanence, or law and mercy, standards and compassion, toil and slack.

Again, there must be a harmonious marriage between the two. It may sound abstract, but we see the fruit of bad marriages every day. It is why liberals have abandoned fatherly standards for maternal compassion, and why they so desperately want a female president just to have one, i.e., not for any logical or defensible reason.

In another essay, Schuon observes that To have doubts about what is ontologically certain is not to want to be. In other words, it is suicide. Now, what is the left but an aggressive project in denying ontological certainties, truths that cannot not be? Which is why, when the mullahs chant "Death to America," Obama just rolls his eyes and says amateurs.

Random Inspiration and Haphazard Creativity

Lately, for some reason -- maybe you've noticed -- I've had even less of an agenda than usual. No plan whatsoever. Yes, it's come to this. I pretty much just pick up a book on the desk, open it, and see what it inspires and provokes. That's why we've been jumping around from topic to topic. I guess it doesn't bother me if it doesn't bother you.

Speaking of inspiration, here's something: "Creation and inspiration" have "a great deal in common."

How's that? Before we get to Sheed's answer, let's take a guess: if God is primordial Creativity, he is also Inspiration, and all genuine creativity is infused with inspiration. Something inspires us to create, right? Alternatively, imagine creativity with absolutely no inspiration.

Yes, Hollywood.

What actually "inspires" such vapid creativity? (And "vapid creativity" should actually be an oxymoron.) Let us count the ways: Money. Power. Status. Narcissism. Sexual access.

So it seems that there is vertical inspiration and horizontal inspiration, the latter producing only caricatures of true creativity.

Back to Sheed. He writes that "God, operating in nothingness, produced the human race." Then, "operating in human minds and wills, produced scripture."

This implies that the human mind, absent God's inspiration, is a kind of nothing. Which it surely is, and for reasons we touched on a couple of posts back: God or nihilism, O or Ø, with no logically defensible ground in between.

More generally, we can all experience this truth in a most intimate way, for inspiration is one of the things that distinguishes us from the beasts. Animals are not inspired. Rather, they live in the closed circularity of their own genetic programing, or within the boundaries of their form, if you prefer.

But human beings are subject to a ceaseless flow of inspiration that might as well be infinite; or we open out to what infinitely transcends us. I remember Terence McKenna -- not that this is the best illustration, but it will do -- musing on what it could mean that in ten minutes (or whatever) of a psilocybin adventure, one could see more art flash before one's inner eye than the human race has produced in 10,000 years. Where is it coming from, and what could it mean?

One could say the same of dreaming, which is like a endless flow of creativity, only untethered by real world constraints and constants. Looked at this way, we can see how the laws of nature are complementary to creativity, because without them there is no reliable foundation to build upon. Dreaming undisciplined by reality, thy name is liberalism.

Could this be how the snake sneaks into the garden? "[I]nto God's Creation nothingness introduced elements quite notably un-divine; so did all these finite minds and wills into scripture."

This latter implies that, just because scripture contains all we need to know vis-a-vis our own salvation, it doesn't follow that it is entirely free of extra-salvation error. One could say that it contains but does not teach error. There is no doubt this is true, which is why anyone can take his five or ten favorite passages and form his own sect -- even one as un-divine as, say, {insert favorite malevolent charlatan}.

There is the inspiration that assisted in the writing of the individual books of the Bible, but what accounts for their totality, their unity, their organic wholeness? That must be an inspiration of a different order.

Remember, when Paul, for example, was writing his occasional letters to this or that community about this or that theological point, he had no way of knowing that these letters would form part of a higher unity with gospels and other works that hadn't even been written yet.

What individual has sufficient inspiration to truly unify scripture on his own? I don't see how it can be done. Rather, it is the work of centuries and the work of communities; or, one might say that it is ultimately both cause and effect of a unitary and inspired, nonlocal "body of Christ," regardless of whether one identifies this body with the Church as such.

"[W]e do not really know how any writer's mind works or any artist's; we hardly know how our own minds work, still less how God's grace works in them" (Sheed, emphasis mine).

Interestingly, I would suggest, somewhat orthoparadoxically, that we know even less of how our own minds work than we do of how God's grace works in our minds. Again, take a mind completely detached and isolated from God. It is unavoidably a kind of nothing, just an absurd and meaningless space that has opened up in a primate brain.

But a grace-infused mind has a direction, an order, a source, a meaning, a creativity, a vector, a destiny, a "north star."

I can only say that when I was an atheist existentialist, I had none of these, and was a total mystery to myself. True, I'm still a mystery, but at least I participate in a bigger one, so I got that going for me. You would think that abandoning my mind would lead to a kind of chaos, but the opposite has occurred: a higher order. And I'm sure this is a common experience: losing oneself is finding oneself, or dying to the world is living in another, etc.

"If Mark had lived long enough to find his own Gospel listed with the inspired books of the Old Testament, he might well have been startled." Indeed, perhaps he is startled still! And he is startled because only now can he see the extent of the inspiration under which he was creating. The veil is lifted, or he can see the underside of the cosmic area rug, with all its zigzagging connections that create the pattern on top.

I'll just leave off with the following quote:

God abides in the inspired books and can still make new contact with the mind and will of the reader, with the depth of his self. When we read, there is possible communication between the Holy Spirit in us and the Holy Spirit in the writer. And that is the point. --F.J. Sheed

In other words, we find and deepen ourselves in the point between in-spirations that ultimately come from elsewhO.

Scripture: IT'S ALIVE!!!

In-spiration means God-breathed, or theopneumatic. It would appear that man qua man is theopneumatic, in that what distinguishes us from the animals is this question of God breathing into us the breath of life.

That last word is another clue, suggesting that inspiration has something to do with the intensity of life -- as in IT'S ALIVE! If something is more inspired and more inspirational, it is more alive, and actually conveys -- or SHOUTS -- its life to us.

As in the "inspired word of God," i.e., scripture. Sheed points out that Paul uses a newish Greek word, theopneustos, for scripture (of course, he would have been referring to the Jewish scriptures), pneustos being related to pneuma, and all of this relating to the Holy Spirit, so we're back to God's breath.

This is bound to sound a bit dodgy to modern ears, at least for those who have never experienced God's breath, or his expiration fueling our inspiration.

Sheed claims that there is no official explanation of exactly what Inspiration is until the First Vatican Council in the 19th century. As usual, the Church tries to steer a middle course between two extremes.

On one side is the idea of Scripture "composed by men without the special aid of God and then approved by the Church's authority." At the other extreme is the notion that scripture conveys "revelation without error," as if God were simply dictating to human stenographers, as Allah to Muhammad.

The official explanation is that the books of scripture "were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit," such that "God so stimulated and moved the authors to write and assisted them in their writing." Thus, scripture is God-breathed, but again, the purpose is to furnish points of reference for human beings to navigate about in the vertical world.

This is quite tricky, as the actual audience for scripture is unimaginably diverse in terms of culture, language, education, intelligence, imagination, historical time period, and more. I don't see how a vertically exiled man could create something that would be so universal as to provide nonlocal points of reference for all comers.

I suppose the closest comparison would be to certain works of art that attain universality and timelessness -- that speak to all men at all times, so long as they should remain men. Note that this is a kind of intensified "life" (as alluded to above), which is why truly inspired art "lives forever," so to speak (i.e., in an analogous way), because it inspires us forever.

Thus, in inspiring men to compose scripture, "God takes the readers into account" and makes "provision for very different readers who were not yet, but would one day be!" You try doing that. It's not easy. It's hard enough to make sense to one person.

Just as in the Incarnation -- in which God submits himself to all of our existential infirmities such as time, space, history, loss, death, etc. -- so too must scripture be "submitted to human limitation." Naturally God could "have eliminated all limitation," but only at the cost of "treating the men as un-men."

Rather, just as "in the Incarnation, he was not pretending to be a man" but became one, with Inspiration "he was not pretending to use men, they were men..." It was a genuine partnership -- which perhaps goes to why even the synoptic gospels have significant divergences. God could have presumably had each writer transcribe the identical verbatim account.

Now, "How God influences a mind while leaving it free is his secret." Is that entirely true? Analogously we could ask how it is that we can be influenced by truth, and yet, preserve our free will. We preserve it because truth loses all merit if it is not freely embraced.

In my experience, God doesn't so much compel as attract. "Compulsion" is analogous to efficient causation, as in past-to-future. But it seems to me that God mostly influences the humansphere via final causation, or in a future-to-present manner. God prefers a certain future which exists via nonlocal attractors which provide those points of reverence we've been discussing of late.

As a matter of fact, Schuon has an essay that goes to this subject. He suggests that there are two spiritual paths, one that is very much rule-based, another which he calls "the path of attraction." To the extent that Christ transcends the Law, it seems to me that he is offering a new way of attraction vs. the existing way of compulsion.

Schuon doesn't explain too much about the way of attraction, but notes that it revolves around "the spiritual intuition of the mystic and the divine aid or Grace that answers it and at the same time provokes it."

This very much corresponds with what I symbolize (⇅), with the caveat that this is actually a continuous spiral, and that the ultimate source -- the alpha and omega of the spiral -- is naturally from above, not from our end. We cannot create it, but we can participate in it.

Elsewhere Schuon says that this path is guided by following what "draws one closer to God," while avoiding that which "takes one away from Him." Thus, "everything in this second path is more independent and spontaneous than in the first; the sense of the nature of things takes precedence over concern for rules or conventions."

Yeah, you could call it an elaborate pretext to be who I am and do what I do.

Open Your Door to the Love Explosion!

Ever since I referred to that point about points of reference, I've been seeing it everywhere. Sheed, for example, asks "how can the finite [shed] any light upon the infinite?" For "whatever concept we use is drawn from finite experience: it is obvious that it must be inadequate: it cannot tell us everything: but can it tell us anything?"

Yes, since these finite concepts are points of reference to the infinite. Two important points about these points: 1) they are -- somewhat surprisingly -- perfectly adequate to get the job done, and 2) without them we would be utterly lost, with no hope of finding ourselves or of being found. You and I would be adrift in the cosmic sea, with no compass, no bearings, and no direction home, just like the roiling foam.

Without God, there is not even a universe to be known, just a random assortment of experiences with no possibility of a metaphysical area rug to pull them together.

In the absence of God "There is no shaped totality, but only myriads upon myriads of individual things, meaningless because no mind presided at their origin, purposeless because no mind intended them, a drift of things drifting where they happen to be drifting, and ourselves elements in the drift; nothing can be known in its context, for a multifold shapelessness is not a context; no integration is possible because there is no integer" (Sheed), i.e., no One OM.

You want nominalism? This is nominalism on stilts, meaning that we are condemned to a horizontal world of pure concrete, with no universals, no abstractions, no transcendentals. It is a world of unremitting appearances, with no reality underneath or overhead. The world, instead of being filled with vertical murmurandoms, consists only of a kind of fragmented speech -- or rather, any coherent message we may discern is just a jumble of cosmic phonemes that we pretend to have meaning, like seeing a Big Dipper in a random assortment of stars.

I don't see any room for wiggle room in this scenario; it's very much an either/or, as in either God or nihilism; or, if nihilism is not the case, then God.

Even for evolutionists, man must be the current last word in evolution. There will presumably be newer and better words in the future, but then again, there can be no "better" in a horizontal universe, only different. In this latter view, there is matter and there is animated matter, but there can be no better or worse animated matter. The liberal idea that a fetus has no more value than a decayed tooth has deep metaphysical roots.

What if man is the "end" of evolution? In other words, what if there can be no possible evolution beyond man?

Man, according to Schuon, "marks not only the summit of earthly creatures, but also, and for this very reason, the exit from their condition" (emphasis mine). Thus, "to see man is to see not only the image of God" but also an open door, a vertical inscape hatch. Man always "opens out" to reality, I believe for the same reason God does. In the Trinitarian view, it is as if, say, the Father cannot help but open out to the Son, and vice versa; it is what they do.

If the Trinity provides us with a point of reference, then it should come as no surprise that we open out to reality, just as reality offers itself to us. There is this mutual indwelling that results in that familiar metacosmic spiral that carries us aloft. How can we be "adrift" when we are quite obviously aloft?

So, man is both summit and exit; or, summit because exit. All other animals are what they are, or in other words, trapped in their forms. But man's form is proportioned to something that transcends it. As such, we are back to the first paragraph above, in that man-as-such is a finite thing that sheds light on the infinite.

You could say that man cannot transcend his own transcendence; or, more to the point, he cannot.... he cannot do whatever the antonym of transcend is. Man is condemned to transcendence, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it short of suicide, whether literal, intellectual, or spiritual.

"The human form cannot be transcended," writes Schuon, being that "its sufficient reason" is "precisely to express the Absolute." Now, the Absolute can have no absolute form, for reasons alluded to above: because the finite cannot contain the infinite. But to say that man is the image and likeness of God is to say that man is a point of reference to God.

That's the good news. But what if man has sunken beneath this proper form? You know, fallen? Then we will be in need of a vertical intervention: call it an Incarnation. Given this principle, then we can say that Jesus (the man) becomes an unsurpassable icon of God; and that our relationship to this icon is likewise another icon, or rather, a participation in the same icon.

This gives new meaning to Jesus' comparison of himself with a door. That's not just the parochial shoptalk of a carpenter.

[I]nfinite love has exploded into our universe; theology is an effort to diagram the explosion. The diagram is indispensable, but it is not the reality and it must not obsess us. What matters is the love, and that cannot be diagrammed. --F.J. Sheed

Time on Steroids

The cosmos itself furnishes little points of reverence everywhere: "Suddenly, in the illumination of poetic light," objects in the external world may "become analogous to our deepest thoughts and emotions" (Taylor).

Which means that the exterior world is not exterior only, but that it radiates a kind of "inwardness." Likewise, our interior is not interior only, but is always prepared to discover itself in the outer world. It's what we do. It is why, for the elect, the world never loses that new car smell.

I am reminded of a fragrant passage by Schuon, in which he reflects upon how "the sacred mountain, seat of the Gods, is not found in space even though it is visible and tangible."

We could say the same of the sacred river, the enchanted forest, the Raccoon National Cemetery in Bismark, North Dakota, or any other holy ground: "it is as if the one who is present there had passed beyond space," and "finds himself virtually reintegrated" into its divine source (ibid.).

Thus, "Certain geographical accidents, such as lofty mountains, are connected through their natural symbolism with the great primordial sanctuaries," such that "For the man of the golden age to climb a mountain was in truth to approach the Principle; to watch a stream was to see universal Possibility at the same time as the flow of forms." But for modern man, "The gates of Heaven, mysteriously present in nature, close before him" (ibid.).

Schuon seems to have believed in a literal Golden Age, which he in turn opposed to the postlapsarian civilizational decay of the present. In other words, historical time for him is entropic and corrosive.

We, however, do not believe this; or rather, we do, except that this temporal catabolism is complemented by a negentropic and renewing flow of grace and other providential goodies. The former is of course compulsory, while the latter is (mostly) voluntary.

In other words, we cannot only swim against the worldly tide, but are assisted in doing so by helpful nonlocal operators. The story in this book would seem to be an example. I've never read it, but my invisible friend at Amazon recommends it to People Like Me.

So, there are still magic mountains and heavenly valleys, except that they have always really been soul-exteriorized or paradise-interiorized. I was about to say that you can always encounter them in fiction and poetry, but I suppose one can only encounter them there, i.e., in what we are calling poetic knowledge.

I might add that while recognizing the world as sacred is entirely valid as far as it goes, it goes farther than that. In other words, natural religion (or supernaturally natural, to be precise) is eventually prolonged (but not negated) by revealed religion.

I just randomly flipped open God and the Ways of Knowing, where it states that revelation proper "replaces the cyclical view of the world" with "a historical view in which time has a meaning" -- just as we said above about negentropic time. You could call it metabolic time, or time on steroids.

In this evolutionary view, time becomes a school, and like all schools, it has a beginning and (thankfully) an end. Only liberalism busses us into a tedious school from which it is impossible for anyone to graduate, forcing us to remain children forever.

The Divine Clueprint is not, in my opinion, any kind of mechanistic or linear program. It's not like a communist Five Year Plan or a liberal Bridge to the Future.

Nevertheless, it is a plan. And "it is fulfilled by progressive stages, the ages of the world, which are a divine course of instruction" (ibid.).

In this adult correspondence course -- in which time corresponds with eternity -- "there is the time of Advent, the preparation, which corresponds to the Old Testament and the choosing of Israel," followed by the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, etc.

Again, this is quite different from natural religion, in that we find out what this creator of nature is like: "Through these works, the living God reveals His methods of action, His customs. It is through these that we are able to know Him" as he is, rather than just through what he does.

Outta time and outta here...

Points of Reverence for Mapping God

I have long contended that, just as there is an unconscious below, there is an unconscious above. It is not as if our ego-island merely floats on a sea of primordial unconsciousness, but rather, that it is like a bead situated on a vertical string, pulled in both directions. Nor is either direction "un" conscious; rather, the non-conscious just operates in the shadows, outside the spotlight of the the conscious self.

Moreover, like the Trinity, we cannot actually make cutandry divisions between the "parts" of our consciousness; while there are distinctions, ultimately we are one, an organismic whole. In fact, every conscious thought partakes of unconsciousness, and vice versa. Conscious / unconscious are complementary, not antagonistic. You can't have one without the other.

In health, anyway. You could say that psychological illness results when they are antagonistic, when, say, the unconscious is forcefully repressed, denied, or projected. This results in an overall diminution of consciousness, because you can't just toss out the bongwater without losing some of your bamba (again, since the mind cannot be divided that way).

So, one thing that makes me a very lonely psychologist is this idea that, just as we may have unconscious pain and conflict from below, we may have unconscious pain and conflict from above. Just as we may repress the "id," we may repress God. For Freud, the superego -- the conscience -- is ultimately just a transformation of id-aggression directed toward the ego. It is wholly learned, not innate. For example, if I regard rape as a bad thing, it is just because my own aggressive desire to rape has been turned toward myself. For Freud, this is the origin of guilt, i.e., self-rebuke.

Anyway, there is much in Poetic Knowledge that goes to vertical repression of the Above. In fact, spontaneous poetic knowing would be evidence of a smoothly functioning and integrated "supraconscious," for lack of a better term.

For example, Aquinas writes of how knowledge of God, since it cannot possibly be directly proportioned to the reason, must make use of "the symbolic poetic mode" in order to communicate its truth. Likewise, Schuon speaks of how revelation and theology contain "points of reference":

"We are here at the limit of the expressible; it is the fault of no one if within every enunciation of this kind there remain unanswerable questions.... [I]t is all too evident that wisdom cannot start from the intention of expressing the ineffable; but it intends to furnish points of reference which permit us to open ourselves to the ineffable to the extent possible, and according to what is foreseen by the Will of God" (emphasis mine).

This is a very helpful way of looking at things, because it takes us from the abstract to the experiential, and avoids pointless arguments about the literalness of scripture. Literal or not, scripture is of no use if it fails to resonate with the supraconscious, i.e., to provide points of reference necessary for thinking higher thoughts, or for transposing thought into a higher key.

Which is why the Raccoon calls them points of reverence.

The points of reverence are not the thing itself, but rather, point to the thing itself. They always implicitly point beyond themselves to that which they cannot explicitly express.

This is quintessentially true of the points of reverence we call revelation. One might say that revelation is not God, but God is revelation, at least in terms human beings can comprehend. The bibliolatrous doctrine of sola scriptura comes very close to denying this distinction, and thus the purpose of revelation.

Now, science too provides us with points of reference. And these are obviously legitimate so long as they are confined to their appropriate bounds. For clearly, even in the most perfect scientific theory imaginable there will still remain "unanswerable questions" that lay at the foot of the inexpressible and cannot breach the walls of the ineffable. Or just say Gödel.

Think about it: if God is a hyper-dimensional object, how would one go about mapping him in 3D? Isn't there a branch of mathematics that goes to this? There are relatively straightforward transformations, as in how a three-dimensional city may be plotted on a two-dimensional map. But God is of infinite dimensionality. Therefore, we could never map him on our own. Rather, he must provide the map, i.e., the points of reverence.

Which reminds me of a story E.F. Schumacher tells in Small is Beautiful. He was visiting the Soviet Union, standing outside an Orthodox church, looking at a map and trying to figure out where he was. But the church was nowhere to be seen on the map, because the God-denying authorities had removed it.

Now, how exactly is this different from public education, or academia? Let's say I'm on the university campus looking at God, but God is nowhere to be found in the syllabus. This is bound to be disorienting.

When I say "looking at God," I am of course referring to an experience of poetic knowledge. Maritain (in Taylor) speaks of a "musical unconscious" which is essentially identical to the poetic mode of knowing, in that it is "a way of seeing the world, seeing the significance of the superficial, what most would dismiss, ignore, or never notice." Through it, we open ourselves to the points of reverence that "[sound] a note from the external senses and [resonate] throughout the interior faculties..." This receptive act "effortlessly assembles impressions and spontaneously gives a spiritual knowledge of being, a kind of song of reality" (Taylor).

Just because God is unglishable, translogical, and mythsemantical, it hardly means there is "nothing there" for us to receive.

Rather, as Voegelin writes, "The truth of reality is not an ultimate piece of information given to an outside observer but reality itself becoming luminous in the events of experience and imaginative symbolization." These symbolic coordinates "give direction to the quest of truth," which is simultaneously inward, outward, upward, and onward.

If This Brain is Rockin', Don't Bother Knockin'

Time only for a brief evocation. You'll have to read between the lines and fill in the details.

Picking up where we ended yesterday -- which was with the affirmation that the "intellect (nous) is itself a revelation, just as revelation is a letter addressed to it."

Therefore, if we're going to be translogical, we would have to conclude that both revelation and intellect share a common substance: let's call it truth. This is really just transposing the Aristotelian view to a higher key. The fact that the soul may "know" means that "the faculties of knowledge and sensation are potentially these objects."

But since the soul cannot literally be identical to the object known, it must mean that the immaterial form is present in us, or that we are able to participate in its form. In the words of Aquinas (in Taylor), "the knowing being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing."

You might say that human beings are adapted to adaptation, adequate to adequation, or conformed to conformation. Which is also why we are evolved to evolve, or to be child-like forever: neoteny rules.

This goes to the trinitarian basis of even the very possibility of knowing. You could say that we are able to get inside the known, or that the known is somehow in us, but either way, there is some heavy interpenetration going on, so if this brain is rockin', don't bother knockin'.

For Taylor, this goes to our poetic nature, in that "it is always the end of poetry to bring us sympathetically inside the experience of reality, always in search of union, fulfilling our innate desire to know."

Shifting gears for a moment, Bollas writes of how we "constantly engage objects crucial to [our] own self experiencing."

This implies a different sort of knowledge embedded in objects, knowledge of ourselves. Or rather, the form of the object resonates with our own form, making explicit what was implicit, or actualizing its latent potential. (And again, in psychoanalytic parlance, "object" includes subjects, i.e., relationships.)

But this management of objects "is part of a complex relation each of us has to ourself," such that "we inherit the tasks of our mothers and fathers." If our parents weren't very good at helping us discover our idiom, then it is likely that we will parent ourselves just as poorly: "The quality of any person's self experiencing will reflect the individual's skill in meeting idiom needs by securing evocatively nourishing objects" (ibid.).

Evocatively nourishing objects. Religion, it seems to me, is very much about contact with evocatively nourishing objects, at least if it works the way it is supposed to. As Bollas puts it, "Some objects (a book, a friend, a concert, a walk) release us into intense inner experiencings which somehow emphasize us" (emphasis mine).

It is as if these objects "lift us into some utterance of self available for deep knowing." While he's not talking about religion per se, this is obviously how religion works on an experiential basis: it "lifts us into some utterance of self available for deep knowing" -- and not available in any other way.

But of course, it is possible to block out this evocative area entirely, otherwise there would be no such thing as atheists. Likewise, it is possible to repress sexuality or any other dimension of the self.

More generally, "Some individuals are reluctant to live in the third area (the intermediate area of experience)..." They impose their own ideas on the vertical, and thus blunt its evocative and transformational possibilities.

I'm out of time this morning, so I'll just conclude by saying don't do that!

I Think I Sort of Disagree

Vanderleun has alerted me to a piece by David Warren called Flatman Rising. He's very forceful in his assertions, but are these assertions cosmically correct?

Warren begins with the entirely sound observation that we not only "live in flatworld," but that this has become "the ground condition for Enlightened man." Around here we call it Flatland, but it's the same idea. It is summed up by Don Colacho, who says that Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot, or like a liberal politician treats an MSM journalist.

Warren references the biologist Richard Lewontin, who rejects genetic determinism because -- it seems to me -- it undermines his religion, in his case, Marxism. Thus, he is a harsh critic of metaphysical and reductionist Darwinism, or -- as in the title of one of his books -- Biology as Ideology:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs [and] in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism."

True, but I too have a commitment to materialism. In fact, no one can be more committed to matter than the Christian, being that it is the temporal stage for the adventure of consciousness and drama of salvation.

But "commitment," of course, is a vertical category. The problem is a de-differentiation and re-fusion of vertical and horizontal. The vertical can never be negated, mind you. To even be conscious is to have transcended matter, but flatland scientism pretends to pull the subject(ive) into the object(ive) without remainder -- i.e., as if that has exhausted the need for any further explanation.

Lewontin continues: "It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

I'm not so sure about that. There is no problem in beginning with the material world. The only alternative is to begin in the ideational world, and thus take a wrong turn into the Great Modern Deviation that begins with Kant.

Note the real problem: modernity doesn't begin with an embrace of the material world, but rather, a rejection. No longer can we know the world, because all we can really know are the forms of our sensibility. So it's really a radical subjectivism masquerading as objectivity.

This latter is also the whole basis for the leftwing attack on science masquerading as a veneration of it. Nothing can be more subjective and relative than liberalism, so the idea that liberals "support science" is laughable. Rather, they use science, where it is convenient, to support their prior commitment to liberalism. What we call "materialism" is really pure verticality pretending to be horizontal.

The cosmically orthodox view is that knowledge indeed begins with the senses. This provides a sure foundation, but the purpose of a foundation is to build upon it.

Warren believes that most people have become unwitting votaries of an evolutionary materialism. This is a separate question. To me, it's a little like the debate over "climate change." Of course the climate is changing. That's what it does. However, it has no built-in direction, no final cause, no telos.

But it's very difficult, if not impossible, to understand the world in the absence of final causes. And if there are final causes, there is evolution toward these nonlocal attractors.

Evolve is derived from a word meaning unfold or unroll; according to Webster's, it means "to disclose by degrees to view," to disentangle, to develop. So, is the world evolving? This has nothing to do with Darwinism, mind you; or, to the extent that Darwinism has any truth to it, it would be because of this deeper context of cosmic disentangling and unfolding. Absent the latter, what we call Darwinism would be strictly impossible.

Warren is half-right in his rejection of evolutionary theologians who "think that God works through evolution." He reserves particular scorn for Teilhard de Chardin, "the ingenious Jesuit charlatan whose works had such a powerful hold on the minds of liberal churchmen around the time of Vatican II," and for whom "Church doctrine was necessarily 'evolving.'"

Truth, of course, does not evolve because it cannot evolve. But this doesn't mean we cannot evolve toward truth. In fact, I just read a completely orthodox book called God and the Ways of Knowing, that goes directly to this question. If man were not evolving, then it would have been possible for God to give the full revelation to the very first man -- or to Abraham -- but this is not how it worked in practice.

Rather, God's revelation (in the Christian view) is very much a matter of a successive unfolding -- limited by man's evolving ability to handle the truth, so to speak -- culminating in the revelation of the Trinity.

Jumping back for a moment to the blessings of our material foundation, Danielou says that "nothing is more dangerous than a religion that claims to have outdistanced reason," for "this can only lead to fanaticism, illuminism, obscurantism... lost in a jungle of superstition" (think only of the Islamists).

Remember, Christianity at its foundation is actually an empirical religion, for if there was no Incarnation then there is no Christianity. Likewise, if we cannot really know the world, then we cannot know Christ either, because we would again have only knowledge of our own neurology.

Here is another relevant passage from Danielou: God "possesses in Himself in a pre-eminent fashion both that which creates the value of mind and that which creates the value of matter. Christianity is not a spiritualism in the Platonic sense of the word, which identifies the divine with the sphere of spirit." Rather, it also has "a materialist aspect" which "is of great practical consequence" -- one consequence of which was the very development of science.

I am no uncritical fanboy of Teilhard, but I think it's unfair to say that he believed man creates Christ via evolution. Rather, my understanding -- and I could be wrong -- is that he sees Christ as the ultimate telos, the omega point that is drawing creation in his wake.

Looked at this way, Christ is not just Word-made-flesh but future-made-now, not just once, but always -- or "once and for all." God becomes man so that man might become God (or be divinized), as in the formulation of various Fathers. From our end this is a teleonomic process.

Warren claims that "God does not create through evolution, and could not possibly do so, for that would mean creating in time. God, who created time, cannot be confined (except by His own kenosis) within what He has created. Rather, God creates through time."

I would affirm rather the opposite, in that there is something of the nature of time in God, only in a supereminent manner. One reason I say this is that I don't see how man should be privileged to have something that God doesn't. To put God entirely on the eternal side of the time/eternity complementarity is to imagine a God who is unmoved and unmovable by anything that occurs in time, say, oh, suffering. Either God suffers with us or he doesn't. And if he does, he moves.

Indeed, I would go further and say that if God relates to us, then he is relative. As Hartshorne says, not only is God relative, but he is the most supereminently relative at all, in that he is the last word in compassion and empathy.

Is this not the deepest meaning of the Trinity, that it is irreducible relationship, such that relationship -- love -- is prior to substance? This is a perfection, not a limitation -- just as an unmovable human being would be far from perfect. And it seems to me that "divine time" (so to speak) is the endless perichoretic boogaloo; and that creative time is a kind of distant reflection of this in the herebelow.

Danielou looks at it in a complementary and orthoparadoxical way: it is fine to say that God is perfectly immobile so long as we immediately add that he is perfectly receptive! To quote one of the early Fathers, "He is stable and immobile, dwelling always in the same place, and yet mobile, since He radiates through all things." Complementarity.

The problem is that it is possible to affirm God so strongly that one negates man. But even God doesn't do this, or we wouldn't be here.

Just because becoming isn't everything, it doesn't follow that it is nothing. A pure "philosophy of the eternal" may end in "the negation of the value of time." There is a kind of divine omnipotence that renders man completely pointless, just a prolongation of God, with no freedom, no dignity, no meaning, and no adventure.

It is also a devaluation of our most precious divine gift, our intellect. What is it for, if not to understand? For Warren, "The very existence of this universe and of ourselves is a bottomless Mystery that cannot be 'solved.' Reason may worm about, and make its observations on our plane, but Revelation provides the only possible access to that vertical dimension."

Yes and no. Reason can actually reason all the way up to the threshold of God, affirming his existence without claiming to know what he's like. Nor do we have to check our intellect at God's door, because revelation is a prolongation of it, not a negation or radical disjunction. Indeed, intellect (i.e., the nous) is itself a revelation, just as revelation is a letter addressed to it.

The Purposeless-Driven Life

Those who wish to make a point of their lives don't remember the exhilaration of not having one, AKA holy infanity, in which life is its own point.

Or rather, life surely has a point. It's just that we don't concoct it, on pain of -- if you are intellectually honest -- immediately reducing it to pure cosmic pointlessness, since we and our dull point are necessarily finite, relative, and contingent. If there is an absolutely necessary point, then it must come from God, nor are we sharp enough to know it unless God lets us in on the secret.

The cosmos is a hierarchy, and there can be no hierarchy without a point. In fact, a hierarchy is defined by its point, toward which all its parts and levels are oriented. It is only because there is an absolute point that there can be relativity at all.

In other words, to say relative is to implicitly acknowledge the Point. The only metaphysical alternative is a kind of pure horizontality that equates to intellectual chaos, AKA unalloyed tenure.

Aren't you glad you aren't in charge of the Point? Here is precisely where we depart from the left, because they not only invent their own point -- which they are free to do -- but then exert all their efforts to impose this point on the rest of us. But what if -- I know, crazy idea -- my point is not Barack Obama's, or Hillary Clinton's, or Harry Reid's, point? I don't want to force my point on them. Beside, my point cannot be forced, rather, only freely accepted, since before I was, I AM.

If you're following me, I think you can see why liberalism is intrinsically hostile to God, since it is in competition with God for the Point of it all.

Eco (in Taylor) writes that "Aquinas was always conscious of the possibility of a pleasure which was pure and disinterested."

We could say the same of having a pure and disinterested point. Indeed, the less interested, the more pure. Think of math. The more interest we have in a certain numerical outcome, the less pure the math, as in government accounting. Math and science only advance if we are "passionately disinterested," so to speak, not invested in any particular outcome. Notice the passion of the global warmists, and how it perverts their findings!

Eco writes of how "Disinterested pleasure means pleasure which is its own end, which is not connected with the satisfaction of animal needs or with utility."

Hmm, what might that be? "An embryonic form of such pleasure already exists in play," which is "an activity whose end is its own fulfillment."

So, play has an end: itself. However, we need to distinguish this from simple objects that have their own end, say, a rock. If a rock is analogous to an atemporal, geometrical point, play is more of a rhythm and a spiral: a rhythmic spiral. It is of time, or better, time is of play. That's how the Hindoos think of it: lila, or the Divine Play. (Every lila son of adwaita is born of a voidgin. -- Petey)

Let's remember too Letter I of MoTT, the point of which is to learn concentration without effort and transform work into play so as to lighten those burdens & yokes.

Now, what is the opposite of play? That would be, er, work. Play should be spontaneous. When it is too planned, it becomes work -- like an office party, or Valentine's day. "Aristotle's principle of 'leisure preceding action' is reversed," so we are unable to approach things in a proper spirit of disinterest.

There is will and there is free will; it seems to me that the former is always interested and thus unfree. For example, an animal has will: the cat is interested in that mouse over there, and is willed to chase it.

But the cat cannot have a disinterested curiosity about the mouse. That requires freedom, slack, leisure, free will, which are precisely what the cat lacks.

But it is not as if play is free of passion. However, this passion is more in the mode of love: "The basic activity of the [free] will is love. Love is the passion of the intellect" (Conrad Baars, in Taylor). And "How different this 'loving will' is from the popular image of the will in general as the realm of high energy, exertion, and the powerhouse of 'getting things done'" (Taylor). Rather, it "rests in being rather than doing," such that -- fine quote here --

The loving will follows the wondering intellect which is open to the mystery of being (Baars).

This is what it means to wonder in the bewilderness, which we are all called upon to do in this semi-permanent state of in-betweenness, i.e., exodus. However, our bewonderment is always oriented to the Point that precedes us, without which we could never be lifted out of Groundhog Day.

Some people seem to have no sense of the day being a potential space. For the melancholic it is an unpunctuated temporality, one day no different from the next. [In contrast], The overly anxious person, perhaps feeling safe while in bed, views the day with trepidation: a hurdle to be leapt over before the next bedtime. --Christopher Bollas

Only playful orientation to the North Point keeps life from becoming a grim hurdle between two deathtimes

Any Idiot Can Pulverize a Statue, but It Takes a Real Genius to Create Ugly Art

How do we attain knowledge of something, anyway? How is it even possible? It is possible because "the soul recognize[s] in material objects a harmony identical with its own structure..." (Eco, in Taylor). But as we've been saying, it also works the other way around -- or in the other direction, rather.

That is, the objects of the world both illuminate, and are illuminated by, the soul. That's a very weird way to run a cosmos, but I wouldn't want to have it any other way, because I am convinced that this is an echo of the Trinity. You are free to call it something other than trinitarian if you like, but you must face the fact that knowledge is an endless perichoretic samba.

Perichoresis is pretty much my new favorite word -- lots of provocative stuff in the wiki article. Through a spontaneous series of clicks, I was just now led to an observation by theologian David Schindler:

"If you would understand yourself, open your mind to the Creator whose first gift to you is your existence. Then testify to what you see." That would be the ultimate instance -- or the very ground -- of recognizing the swirling harmony between being, existence, and knowledge.

Beauty can never be separated from this process. Taylor cites the example of a medieval village, which does not conform "to an imposed grid planned by a city engineer," but rather, to the "spontaneous impulse of builders in relation to the different sizes of the shops and houses.... along the rising and falling rural roads that yielded to the contours of the countryside..."

That brings back memories of Christopher Alexander. A memoir of the future to go along with Alexander's vertical recollection.

Such vertical re-cognition is "the genesis of aesthetic pleasure" (Eco). Moreover, it is "the connection between sense and intellect that precedes scientific knowledge." It is where we start our journey into world and self.

Both science and poetry begin in aesthetic arrest. Which can be taken in two ways, because some aesthetic sensibilities are more developmentally arrested than others, e.g., atheistic materialism, an ugly metaphysic to complement an unattractive soul. Beautiful souls -- expansive, open, fluid, grateful, bewondered -- spontaneously enquire elsewhy for their idiom.

But no matter how complicated you try to make things, It's always in the first place you look!

This is why, as Eco says, art may "simultaneously instruct and delight" -- except that I would say "must," since this is the sufficient reason of art. Unless you are one of those people who think the purpose of art is to produce things that are ugly and make us more stupid, e.g., a college dean or TV executive.

When I say that it's always in the first place we look, I think I mean this: that the cosmos is "a whole and living reality, significant and mysterious" (Taylor).

Note that this is the basis, the fundamental mindset, of the scientific attitude, for if the world weren't both significant and mysterious, why bother? And if the soul weren't equally significant and mysterious, why bother²?

If you really want to get to the bottamuvital, just say Creation: what is it, and how is it possible?

Again, who wants to create ugly? Doesn't ugly happen by itself? No, it takes a great deal of effort -- it's not as easy as pulverizing statues, for Modern man destroys more when he constructs than when he destroys (Don Colacho's aphorisms). It's much harder to be a performance artist than an Islamist barbarian. That's the work of an instant, whereas Madonna is the work of a lifetime.

It's orthoparadoxicality², in that so much beauty just happens by itself. Man has always recognized this: the moment there was a man, there was a soul noticing the beauty of the sky, the mountains, the sea, that cute girl over there. And The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face (Don Colacho). But the wife can try to capture it with her delicate new camera:

Here's another one I like. The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion another Johnny Bench, but at least he can try:

More recent:

You Must Be Dreaming!

Yes, it takes all kinds to make a world. But what if the world only permits one kind -- as on college campuses, or in the NFM (non-Fox media), or in the billion-strong Islamic Terristan? Then if you merely want to be yourself, you're SOL.

"The world is like a giant shopping mall," said Bob, unable to think of a less banal description. Some stores interest us, while others are almost invisible.

First, notice how this differs from all other animals, who have only particular interests that are hardwired into their brainframe. The proverbial one-eyed cat sniffs around the seafood store, while the bird dog just wants to take my baby away.

By the way -- and I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of this -- it occurred to me that one way to think about how Jesus could be fully God and fully man, is to compare it to how we are all animal and all man. Some tenured primates under the influence of 100 proof Darwinism think that just because we are all animal, this somehow fully explains our humanness. At the other end, some religious people think that just because we are human creatures, we can't really be animals.

But like Jesus, we have two natures in one person. A big difference, I suppose, is that these two natures can become fractured or perverted in man, so they don't function harmoniously. Indeed, one of the purposes of Christianity is to divinize our lower nature and bring it into harmony with the human. You might say that the animal must be crucified in order to be resurrected into something higher. As a matter of fact, I believe MoTT says something similar.

Bollas writes of our childhood "investiture of the world" with what Wordsworth calls the first Poetic spirit of our human life. Don't you remama that timeless time of infanity? I do, but not in any way that can be articulated with words. Rather, it is a felt reality, something prior to the words we use to describe it.

Indeed, "It is exceptionally difficult to capture the sense of place each of us feels within our world," the "dense textures of self experience that [bring] some known, but only marginally thinkable, recollection into being" (ibid.).

This is again the realm of Middle Earth that flourishes between the ponderable world and our own poetic sensibility. But that is where we always live: "We walk about in the metaphysical concrescence of our private idioms." Moving through this world "evokes states sponsored by the specific objects we encounter," such that "in a very particular sense, we live our life in our own private dreaming" (ibid.).

That might sound a little new-agey, but again, the work of creating a world takes place in the imaginative and resonant space of the In Between. This is one thing that leftists do not understand. In fact, their position is frankly incoherent, as they pretend to eliminate Middle Earth, reducing it at one end to a naive scientism, and dissolving it at the other into a deconstructionist tyranny of relativism.

For Bollas, "the human subject becomes the dream work of his own life," meaning that, just as in a dream, "we constantly endow objects with psychic meaning" and "walk amidst our own significance." But it's one thing to do this consciously and with insight, another thing entirely to imagine that everyone should or even can live in our particular worldspace. Strokes & folks. What is the American dream but the cosmic right to be different? And what is the leftist -- or Islamist -- nightmare but the obligation to be the same?

Here again, this is the repressive project of the left -- to shove everyone into their cramped little worldcage. But the human imagination always dwarfs any such confinement. It cannot be contained because it is the container.

The logocentric world is not made of objects or processes; rather it is made of language. The cosmos always speaks to man, for it is God's first revelation. But this is only the coondergarden. God successively reveals himself as man becomes increasingly capable of receiving and assimilating the message. The Arc of Salvation really begins with Creation; or, creation and salvation are not-two.

Danielou writes of how even our furriest of furbears found theirsoph "in a world which from its very beginning is a world of grace and sin" -- of vertical energies and alienation from them.

Danielou goes on to say that "an aptitude for religion is a human datum," which simply means that we have an innate idiom for it. We don't have to look for it. Rather, it will always find us, even if only with the objects of the world -- from the terrestrial landscape to the celestial skyscape. To paraphrase Danielou, these are like loans against future revelation. We can pay them back as God successivley reveals himself in the fullness of time.

Thus, there is "a word that God speaks to the whole earth though the visible world." Perhaps Joyce can shed some obscurity on the subject: if you are abcedminded to this claybook, what curios of signs in this allaphbed! Can you rede its world?

Well? Can you? Paul can, because "the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." Thus, "the whole cosmos takes on a symbolic dimension" (Danielou).

But again, that's not the end of the story, only the beginning. Subsequent revelations will occur in history and in man.

Or not, depending on the case. For, "what if I don't know which objects serve me? If I don't know, then my day" -- and my life -- "is likely to be a fraught or empty occasion" (Bollas). There are some people -- okay, many -- who "seem to have no sense of the day being a potential space."

Which the Raccoon calls "cosmopathology," in which case the mind is compelled to select idiomatic "objects that are congruent with unconscious illness," AKA mind parasites. In a free country, if you're looking for objects to reflect your soul sickness, you will have no difficulty finding them. For a drowsy man's dream is a wakeman's blightmare.

The Blest Things in Life are Invisible

So, I caught Nurse Ratched's press conference yesterday, and was struck by how much she really does remind me of Nurse Ratched. It's spooky. Between her and Obama, it's difficult to say who's the more irritating.

And yet, there are obviously people -- millions of them -- who not only don't find her irritating, but want her to be their Big Nurse.

Speaking of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, this reminds me of when McMurphy discovers that most of the other patients are there voluntarily. In other words, they choose to live under the tyrannical compassion of Nurse Hillary.

--Now, look... I'm voluntary here, see? I'm not committed. I don't have to stay here. I mean, I can go home anytime I want.

--You can go home anytime you want?

--That's it.

--You're bullshitting me! He's bullshitting me, right?

--No, Randall, he's telling you the truth. As a matter of fact, there are very few men here who are committed...

--Jesus, I mean, you guys do nothing but complain about how you can't stand it in this place, and then you haven't got the guts to walk out? What do you think you are, for Christ's sake? Crazy or something? Well, you're not. You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole walking around on the streets.

--Those are very challenging observations you made, Randall. I'm sure some of the men would like to comment.

The subsequent scene is very much like yesterday's press conference except that instead of cigarets, Cheswick wants his emails (for they belong to us):

First of all, You sit down, Mr. Cheswick, and wait your turn. Go ahead, sit down! I want to first respond to this planted question about whether this phony scandal is really because Vagina.

--I would like to know about your emails. May we have your emails, please, Mrs. Clinton?

Eventually Cheswick decompensates in frustration, and all hell breaks loose: "Look, I don't want Jeb Bush's emails. And I don't want Bill Clinton's, or Colin Powell's, or John Kerry's, or Brian Williams'... Do you understand that? I want your emails, Mrs. Clinton!

Here's what I don't quite understand. Everyone who sees One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest presumably identifies with McMurphy. Can you imagine seeing the movie and rooting for Nurse Ratched to break his spirit?

Yet, in real life, the same people are liable to be rigid and tyrannical little Nurse Ratcheds. They're in charge of the asylum, but are crazier than the inmates. Does anyone out there think that Bill and Hillary are models of mental health? Or that they don't have a rather odd arrangement to go under the heading of "marriage"?

Speaking of films, I would bet there is a 100% correlation between people who support Hillary and people who identify with the snipees instead of The Sniper. Look at Michael Moore: his uncle was supposedly killed by a Nazi sniper, so snipers are immoral cowards!

Which is like saying my uncle was killed in a knife fight, so surgeons are sadistic butchers!

(Just to be clear, obviously not all Hillary supporters despise The Sniper, but all who despise him support Big Nurse Clinton -- or someone worse, e.g., Big Chief Warren.)

In any event, the above actually goes to what we've been discussing about idiom, because people support politicians who speak their interior language. George Washington resonates with my idiom. Likewise Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan. Conversely, Obama speaks a foreign idiom, as does Hillary. There is no interior resonance whatsoever. They are irritating and unappealing in every way. They grate.

I suppose that's a good word for an environment in which you cannot discover your idiom: it grates. It goes against the psychic grain. It's intrinsically frustrating. If you're anything like me, it makes you wanna throttle somebody.

But we have to use our words. Which isn't exactly a fair fight, because they get to back up their unctuous words with the violence of the state. We can't tell the IRS: "I've gone through my records and provided you with the amount I owe. No, you cannot see my records because they belong to me."

Which we should be allowed to say, by the way. Among other things, a flat tax would restore our fourth amendment protection against involuntary colonoscopies.

Let me change the focus before she makes a maniac out of me.

Bollas writes of how "We each live amidst thousands of [idiomatic] objects that enlighten our world -- things that are not hallucinations," but whose "meaning resides in [an] 'intermediate space' or 'third area': the place where subject meets thing, to confer significance in the very moment that being is transformed by the object."

Therefore, the world -- a particular world, i.e., yours or mine -- exists in this intermediate space "between the subject's state of mind and the thing's character."

This goes very much to what we were saying a few weeks back about Interpersonal Neurobiology: that there is always the irreducible trinity of mind, brain, and relationships. The latter can never be "seen," but nor are they only in the brain or mind.

Rather, they are always in-between. In fact, I would say that they constitute in-betweenness as such. Because human beings are intrinsically relational, we live in this resonant intermediate space.

Interestingly, this whole way of thinking occupies a kind of third area between a completely uncritical realism and Kant's transcendental idealism. The former holds that we experience the world as it is, while the latter maintains that experience is essentially constrained by our innate categories of knowing.

However this Third Way combines both: that we do have access to the real world, but that we personalize the world via our own idiom. Think of two people watching the same baseball game, one who has a passion for the sport, the other knowing nothing about it. Obviously they will perceive very different things. And most of what the enthusiast perceives will be invisible, existing only in that third space.

Now, this is quintessentially true of religion. While we can all see, for example, a Catholic service, the real action is taking place in the intermediate space. More generally, the invisible action between God and man is relational and intersubjective. Revelation is revealed in this nonlocal third world, or not at all. You can ask for visible signs and wonders, but you still have to perceive their invisible significance.

To be continued...

Chaos and Control, Destiny and Fate: You Can't Plan for the Surprise of Your Life

It's amazing how subtle some of these dead old white men could be. Augustine, for example, writes that "'To use' is to put something at the disposal of the will, whereas 'to enjoy' is to use a thing with satisfaction, which is no longer a matter of hope but actual reality."

So, we willfully "use" a thing in the hope that it will actually satisfy us. Obviously, satisfaction is not something we can will -- even for people who have the means to will just about anything they want. Indeed, everybody tells me so: can't buy me love.

This, I think, goes to why happiness is wrapped up in surprise as opposed to planning. To plan for happiness is to attempt to appropriate satisfaction into the will, but that's just a hope, not an actuality.

And many people would rather hope for happiness than actually live it. Or, more to the point, they are presently unhappy, but live in the hope that, with the right plan, it will occur in the future. Which it never does. Unless it is in some surprising and unplanned way.

Real enjoyment seems to be a matter of love as opposed to will; love is a kind of self-offering or self-opening, while will is more of a crystalized intent. I'm not expressing that very clearly, but think of the difference between, say, the perpetually self-offering God of Christianity vs. the permanent willfulness of Allah. One is always giving, while the other is always doing. The former is a lover, the latter a q'ntrol fariq.

Which reminds me. It seems that Boko Haram has pledged its allegiance to ISIS:

I pledge allegiance to the mahdi of the Islamic State of Iraq; and to the caliphate for which it stands, one world, under sharia, with tyranny and sadism for all.

What is our fundamental problem with the Islamic state, and with Islam more generally? That they are indeed control freaks. Not only are no surprises permitted, but technically they are impossible, being that everything issues directly from the will of Allah.

This is at antipodes to Christian liberalism, which is rooted in liberty. The Christian God creates; the Muslim god compels. Is it possible to compel creativity? Not really. One can compel the circumstances for bringing it about -- i.e., self-discipline -- but it is an oxymoron to force a surprise. Sergeant Pepper was a surprise. All the groups thereafter who tried to squeeze out their own Sergeant Pepper just produced kitsch or krap.

Why did Christendom vault ahead of the rest of the world, while Islam in particular is mired in backwardness? Backwardness is actually hard, while progress is easy. How is that?

Well, think, for example, of how hard it was for the Soviet Union to control its citizens. Impossible, really. And yet, I remember reading of how Kruschev asked Nixon how the US produced enough bread to feed its people without someone at the top commanding it. In the US it is easy to feed -- and overfeed -- our people. How? By doing nothing. It happens by itself, so long as the state doesn't interfere. State interference causes bubbles, shortages, and distortions, as in housing, medicine, and college.

All of this goes directly to what we have been saying about idiom and the destiny drive, for the soul requires freedom in order to discover and actualize itself. It needs a range of potential objects, ideas, and relationships to select from, because everyone is different. We are even big enough to tolerate the presence of people to whom the Koran speaks. Which is just another way of saying that Christianity is expansive enough to contain Islam, whereas the converse is impossible. There is a reason why there can be no churches in Saudi Arabia (and no God in public schools).

"The soul recognize[s] in material objects a harmony identical with that of its own structure, and this recognition [is] the genesis of aesthetic pleasure" (Eco, in Taylor). Exactly. Bollas calls it the "erotics of being," so we're back to loving-as-knowing:

"Certain objects, like psychic 'keys,' open doors to unconsciously intense -- and rich -- experience in which we articulate the self that we are.... This selection constitutes the jouissance of the true self, a bliss released through the finding of specific objects that free idiom to its articulation.... such releasings are the erotics of being..."

Well, this morning got away from me. To be continued....

Monsters and Crosses

Aristotle once cracked that "one does not know the content of a desire unless one knows what ultimately satisfies it" (in Taylor).

This comes very close to what we mean by idiom, for just as satisfaction of a desire teaches us what we had implicitly wanted, the "destiny drive" teaches us who we are by selecting (or by being mysteriously attracted to) objects, experiences, and relationships which "materialize elements latent to [the] personality" (Bollas).

Aristotle wrote of how, "through repeated encounters with the world," experience transforms the particulars of the senses into the universals "that come to rest in the soul." Philosophy itself "lies in a broad circle about the loose space of wonder," such that this primordial wonderlust is the beginning and end of our journey. Thus, philosophy "is what it is before it can be termed knowledge" per se.

By the same token, we could say that we are who we are even before we are anyone in particular. As Bollas writes, the discovery and articulation of our idiom -- the destiny drive -- is "dependent on the environment's sensitive presentation of objects for such use."

By "environment" he means the human environment -- in particular, the parents whose job it is to figure out who this mysterious little person is and what he wants. You can't give the child "just anything" -- or in other words, treat him anonymously -- unless you want to attenuate his destiny drive and make it more complicated for him to become who he is.

Or, parents can try to implant a false destiny, which is something I see a lot of these days. Living as I do on the white trash side of the border to some mega-affluent areas (e.g., Malibu), every child has been pre-selected to attend an elite university, so grades and homework and achievement are absurdly important even in elementary school -- as if the most important point of childhood isn't to freaking have one.

I can't recall it being this way when I was a kit. Nowadays there is such an absurd mystique associated with college, which one would think couldn't have survived the experience of having actually attended one of these graveyards of curiosity. In other words, one can imagine how my father, who had an 8th grade education (back when it meant something), might have been overawed by the prospect of Higher Education.

But most boomers attended college and then some. Do they really believe it "educated" them? Or that they obtained something there that cannot be obtained elsewhere for much less money? Please. Don't confuse the Destiny Drive with the Conspiracy. That's elementary.

This is interesting: Aristotle says that while knowledge of a thing "requires possession of it," "we are not in possession of a thing until we love it."

So, you might say that love is the thing -- or the Thing prior to the thing -- for he means the "delight and desire given to this initial act of knowing," all the way up to the last toppermost of the papamost act of knowing, i.e., the beatific vision, or contemplation of God.

Why indeed is there such a thing as "the pleasures of the mind?" Why this soul-delight?

Normally we think of the hedonist as someone who simply indulges the pleasures and passions of the body. I would suggest that so long as pleasure is confined to that cramped dimension, it is prima facie evidence of a failed destiny drive; or in other words, the drive has misfired, or is maybe compensating for what has been lost "above" by pursuing what is below.

It occurs to me that this is the opposite of how Freud characterizes it. For him, pursuit of the higher is simply a sublimation of lower drives. It is a defense mechanism, a pale substitute for what we really want, which is basically food, sex, and status among the primates.

Now, there was a time that I couldn't help believing that, or at least entertaining it. After all, I was in graduate school, learning psychology from the proper authorities. To paraphrase the famous bumpkin-sticker: Freud said it, I believe it, and that settles it. I don't want to oversimplify it, but nevertheless, not a single one of my professors spoke of the soul, or of God, or of the spiritual life.

I went through maybe six months in the "Freudian mode," so to speak. Looking back on it, I can't really say whether it was the cause or consequence of a depression, but depressing it was. How could it not be? Everything I have ever done or will do is just a self-deceiving transformation of primitive instincts?

I didn't intend for this post to get all personal, but perhaps it is instructive, for that depression speaks to a Destiny Drive Fail. Here I am, in the place I am supposed to be -- or where the Conspiracy wants me to be -- and I am not happy.

But you know the old line: more tears are shed over answered prayers. Which is another way of saying thank God for pain, which is ultimately another way of saying thank God for the Cross! I've been thinking about that last one for the past week or two... How to put it...

It started with an episode of the Journey Home on EWTN. The guest was talking about how when everything was going well for him in life, it tended to swell his narcissism and grandiosity, and thus alienate him from the Cross. Conversely, his "afflictions," so to speak, brought him back down to earth and closer to God.

I think something similar happens to me. Now, let's extrapolate this to an extreme case. Let's take someone who actually does succeed in becoming a Prince of this world. Would he not be a narcissistic monster? Is one of the salutary purposes of the Cross to prevent Monsters? Otherwise, why flash it before vampires and such? And why does the anti-Christian world produce so many monsters?

That was a short paragraph, but it strikes me as loaded with meaning, with things to chew on.

So chew on. It always takes me about six months to get used to Daylight Savings Time, so I slept late and now have to get ready for work...