God Knows

God is freedom as such, whereas we only participate in this freedom -- identical to how we are conscious of truth, beauty, and goodness, without ever being the source of these transcendentals. If we were the source of these, then... well, for starters, man would not be such a mystery to himself. 

Supposing you're not a mystery to yourself, I can't think of many good excuses. Most likely, you're just living in a mind-forged reality tunnel, or worse, assimilated into the Matrix created by everyone and no one, prick by prick. Either way, you are existing in a state of ontological contraction in order fit into your shrunken counter-world.

Our mystery is at once an absence and a presence. Schuon:

Whether we like it or not, we live surrounded by mysteries, which logically and existentially draw us toward transcendence.

For -- you will have noticed --

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

Either/or: if our intelligence isn't made for, and conformed to, the Absolute, then it's not even intelligence: "To claim that knowledge as such can only be relative amounts to saying that human ignorance is absolute." The absolute relativity of postmodernity confines us to one of those reality tunnels or matrices alluded to above. 

Thus, "the world scatters us, and the ego compresses us," such that "forgetfulness of God becomes a habit." Man "ceases to be himself; the soul is ensnared by the periphery, it is as if deprived of its center."

I don't know about you, but I hate it when that happens. For "The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandon of the soul to the caprices of the periphery." Genesis 3 All Over Again. 

Bad news / good news: "It is a fact that man cannot find happiness within his own limits; his very nature condemns him to surpass himself, and in surpassing himself, to free himself."

More bad news / good news: 

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to being where one is, and on the other hand, one has to turn this place into a center through the Remembrance of God; for wherever God is evoked, wherever He is manifested, there is the Center.

Echoing what was said in the first paragraph about freedom, "This freedom would be meaningless without an end prefigured in the Absolute; without the knowledge of God and of our final ends, it would be neither possible nor useful."

Like the intelligence from which it flows, an impossibility or a nuisance, a dream or a nightmare.

With those prelumenaries out of the way, let's complete our dive into Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God, specifically, to the last chapter, which delves into exactly how God is related to the world. 

For in the classical view, it is as if we are related to God, but God isn't truly related to us, since the latter implies relativity, and relativity implies mutability. As I've mentioned before, I have no problem with this -- I can't even think about God in any other way -- but apparently it's a Big Problem for theologians who are way above my praygrade. 

Although I don't consider myself to be one, Clarke credits "process thinkers" with the conception of God as 

profoundly involved and personally responsive to the ongoing events of His creation, in particular to the conscious life of created persons as expressed in the mutuality, the mutual giving and receiving, proper to interpersonal relations (emphases mine).

Not to belabor the point, but I don't see how we can have it both ways, i.e., that God is immutability itself, from all eternity, and that "what happens in the world makes a real difference to the conscious life of God."

I've heard sophisticated people defend the doctrine of immutability and absolute foreknowledge of God by comparing it to a mother who tells a child not to eat a cookie, knowing full well that the moment she leaves the kitchen, the child will "choose" to reach up to the counter and pull the cookie out of the jar.

But this isn't an adequate analogy if the parent knew from all eternity that the child would inevitably eat the cookie -- and indeed, created the child to eat it. Either we're free or we're not free; I don't see any wiggle room.

Is there really no contingency this world? And if not, then how is the world distinct from God's own necessity? If we deny contingency, then the world seems to merge with, and be indistinguishable from, necessary being, and how is this different from a monistic pantheism?

Just asking.

Granted, I'm a simple man, but there seems to be a simple way out. Clarke speaks for me:

our metaphysics of God must certainly allow us to say that in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do, that He receives love from us and experiences joy precisely because of our responses.

Does it not say somewhere that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repenting than ninety-nine who don't need to? How does that work, exactly, if heaven knew all along that the sinner would repent? "Joy" doesn't seem compatible with a jaded I knew it all along.

Back to the easy way out of this conundrum -- easy for me, anyway. Schuon often discusses it in the context of God's infinitude, but I'll save that for a subsequent post. Let's first review how Clarke deals with the question, because I think there's some overlap. He speaks of a "relational consciousness" in God, which nevertheless

does not involve change, increase or decrease, in the Infinite Plenitude of God's intrinsic inner being and perfection -- what St. Thomas would call the "absolute" (non-relative) aspect of His perfection. 

At the same time, "To receive love as a person"

is not at all an imperfection, but precisely a dimension of the perfection of personal being as lovingly responsive.... 

And 

if we examine the matter more fully, we realize that God's "receiving" from us, being delighted at our response to His love, is really His original delight in sharing with us in His eternal Now His own original power of loving and infinite goodness which has come back to Him in return.  

An image floats into my head: God has set before us two cookies, one carrying the false promise to transform us into gods, the other actually accomplishing what it symbolizes. Perhaps he really doesn't know which one we'll choose, but he will be delighted if it's the latter. 

I'll conclude with this passage:

As to what God's timeless knowledge of our changing world is like, we have no clear idea and should be more willing... to leave this as a mystery, not prematurely closing off any metaphysical options....

The mode of the divine presence is left entirely mysterious. In other words, it is impossible for us ever to say in our language when God knows anything. Any translation from the all-inclusive Now of God into any of our exclusive "nows" or "whens" is irremediably equivocal.  

Only God knows.

Looking at Freedom Face to Farce

A reader asks if we would be so kind as to "explore further the paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom" in human beings. This is of course a Big Question, as it is fundamentally linked to Everything. Indeed, to say or even think the word "freedom" is to have situated oneself totally outside any model of reality. 

Wait what? You heard me: people tend to either take freedom for granted or make it go away by denying it altogether (a la scientism or Marxism), but its presence changes everything. I suppose we could throw in a third ideology -- existentialism -- but this simultaneously affirms freedom while utterly negating its meaning and significance, so it's a nonsartrer.

I first became aware of the ontologically explosive nature of freedom in a passage from a book by Stanley Jaki called Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth. The book is a meditation on various fundamentals of existence such as objects, change, causality, mind, history, and purpose. 

Obviously, any complete metaphysic -- better, metaphysic, full stop -- must account for each of these in an intellectually satisfying way: no dodging, spinning, reducing, explaining away, our going wobbly at key junctures. Chapter 4 is on the category of Free Will, right between Science and Purpose (and to champion the obvious, neither science nor purpose are conceivable in the absence of free will).

Now, by way of context, when I first read this book I was a psychoanalytically informed psychologist, and in all my training, we didn't talk much about freedom. There was plenty about causation -- in particular, unconscious causation -- but not much discussion about what was supposed to happen once we were (allegedly) liberated from this pathological causation. It leaves the question: okay, I'm free from my neurotic conditioning, now what? Why even be free? What are we supposed to do with it?

I know: let's do some science! But according to science, free will isn't possible. Or, supposing we are free, there is no conceivable scientific explanation. Shouldn't we be a little more curious about this, if not frankly alarmed?

A side-thought just trickled into my head: ever notice how the same people who insist that sexuality is fixed from birth want to shape it from kindergarten? Big Groomer, like Big Homo, wants to have it both ways. 

Anyway, some passages from the book:

in the final analysis, the elemental registering of free will almost exhausts whatever can be said about its reality. Everything else is embellishment, very useful and informative as it may be, because it is irrelevant unless achieved and articulated freely. 

It's as if the registering of free will encloses us in a tautology, except it's the opposite: it liberates us from absurcularity, for the intimation of free will "belies mere material existence," and here we are, existing immaterially and thinking about it (which amount to the same thing): "All arguments against free will are so many proofs of it," nor does the most determined determinist argue deterministically.

Now, everyone believes in miracles, for there are no less than three: existence, experience, intelligence; or objects, subjects, and the flow of intelligibility between them: the universe never stops speaking, nor do we ever stop hearing and understanding it in diverse modes and on various levels. Free will is subjectivity itself, for the latter is at a right angle to mere material existence, ultimately leading all the way up to its nonlocal source. Bottom line:

far more grippingly than one's immediate grasp of reality does one's registering of the reality of one's free will bring one face to face with that realm of metaphysical reality which hangs in mid-air unless suspended from that Ultimate Reality, best called God, the Creator. 

I'd actually like to draw back from that conclusion somewhat, and stop with Ultimate Reality. We'll eventually get to Creator, but let's first marinate in this question of how ultimate reality must be in order for free beings to be here in it (and therefore simultaneously out of it). Not to belabor the point, but it's an exceedingly queer situation.  

Remember when Helen Keller suddenly grasped the significance of water? It literally changed everything, ushering her into a new cosmos transcending the material prison to which she had been confined. The recognition of freedom should do something similar to us. But I suppose this is where Genesis 3 comes in. Adam and Eve (AKA we) were free, but chose badly. Our freedom, it seems, is somehow compromised near the source. We'll no doubt return to this conundrum. 

Come to think of it, Genesis 3 speaks to the intrinsic bond between freedom and responsibility. In short, freedom has a vector and a telos, so we appreciate right away that it can be misused. Indeed, if it can't misused, then it's not freedom, now is it? So in order to have freedom we must have the possibility -- even inevitability -- of its misuse. Nevertheless, woe to those who misuse it. 

But this too (i.e., woeful consequences for misuse) must be considered a gift in the overall scheme of things, because otherwise freedom is reduced to meaninglessness: if our acts don't matter, then neither does freedom. The point is, without freedom there is no ought, only is, and is is not guilty by reason of inevitability (and not meritorious for the same reason).  

So, "Freedom is a mystery on the natural level in the sense that it cannot be reduced to anything else. It is a primary datum, a supreme, most immediately known reality." 

But a true mystery on the natural level is not to be equated with mere ignorance -- as if the accumulation of natural knowledge will eventually eliminate the mystery. No, this is one of those Primordial Mysteries that point beyond themselves, above and beyond the material. 

To what? Let's stipulate that we are free. This being the case, we are free to create stuff, like machines and works of art. But are we free to create freedom? Obviously not. We can create robots, computers, and NPC progressives, but we cannot conjure freedom. Jaki concludes his chapter by suggesting that only what (whom) we call the Creator could 

create something, an act of free will, which is both fully created and in that sense "physically," that is, fully determined, and yet genuinely free at the same time.

Thus,

The mystery of free will ceases to appear a contradiction in terms, or a wholly unmanageable conundrum only when seen in the context of the infinite power and goodness of God. He created man to be free so that man's service may have that merit which only a freely performed act can have. 

Now that is a heavy responsibility. No wonder humans reject it. (We're not done with this subject, so To Be Continued.)

Looking at Freedom Face to Farce

A reader asks if we would be so kind as to "explore further the paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom" in human beings. This is of course a Big Question, as it is fundamentally linked to Everything. Indeed, to say or even think the word "freedom" is to have situated oneself totally outside any model of reality. 

Wait what? You heard me: people tend to either take freedom for granted or make it go away by denying it altogether (a la scientism or Marxism), but its presence changes everything. I suppose we could throw in a third ideology -- existentialism -- but this simultaneously affirms freedom while utterly negating its meaning and significance, so it's a nonsartrer.

I first became aware of the ontologically explosive nature of freedom in a passage from a book by Stanley Jaki called Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth. The book is a meditation on various fundamentals of existence such as objects, change, causality, mind, history, and purpose. 

Obviously, any complete metaphysic -- better, metaphysic, full stop -- must account for each of these in an intellectually satisfying way: no dodging, spinning, reducing, explaining away, our going wobbly at key junctures. Chapter 4 is on the category of Free Will, right between Science and Purpose (and to champion the obvious, neither science nor purpose are conceivable in the absence of free will).

Now, by way of context, when I first read this book I was a psychoanalytically informed psychologist, and in all my training, we didn't talk much about freedom. There was plenty about causation -- in particular, unconscious causation -- but not much discussion about what was supposed to happen once we were (allegedly) liberated from this pathological causation. It leaves the question: okay, I'm free from my neurotic conditioning, now what? Why even be free? What are we supposed to do with it?

I know: let's do some science! But according to science, free will isn't possible. Or, supposing we are free, there is no conceivable scientific explanation. Shouldn't we be a little more curious about this, if not frankly alarmed?

A side-thought just trickled into my head: ever notice how the same people who insist that sexuality is fixed from birth want to shape it from kindergarten? Big Groomer, like Big Homo, wants to have it both ways. 

Anyway, some passages from the book:

in the final analysis, the elemental registering of free will almost exhausts whatever can be said about its reality. Everything else is embellishment, very useful and informative as it may be, because it is irrelevant unless achieved and articulated freely. 

It's as if the registering of free will encloses us in a tautology, except it's the opposite: it liberates us from absurcularity, for the intimation of free will "belies mere material existence," and here we are, existing immaterially and thinking about it (which amount to the same thing): "All arguments against free will are so many proofs of it," nor does the most determined determinist argue deterministically.

Now, everyone believes in miracles, for there are no less than three: existence, experience, intelligence; or objects, subjects, and the flow of intelligibility between them: the universe never stops speaking, nor do we ever stop hearing and understanding it in diverse modes and on various levels. Free will is subjectivity itself, for the latter is at a right angle to mere material existence, ultimately leading all the way up to its nonlocal source. Bottom line:

far more grippingly than one's immediate grasp of reality does one's registering of the reality of one's free will bring one face to face with that realm of metaphysical reality which hangs in mid-air unless suspended from that Ultimate Reality, best called God, the Creator. 

I'd actually like to draw back from that conclusion somewhat, and stop with Ultimate Reality. We'll eventually get to Creator, but let's first marinate in this question of how ultimate reality must be in order for free beings to be here in it (and therefore simultaneously out of it). Not to belabor the point, but it's an exceedingly queer situation.  

Remember when Helen Keller suddenly grasped the significance of water? It literally changed everything, ushering her into a new cosmos transcending the material prison to which she had been confined. The recognition of freedom should do something similar to us. But I suppose this is where Genesis 3 comes in. Adam and Eve (AKA we) were free, but chose badly. Our freedom, it seems, is somehow compromised near the source. We'll no doubt return to this conundrum. 

Come to think of it, Genesis 3 speaks to the intrinsic bond between freedom and responsibility. In short, freedom has a vector and a telos, so we appreciate right away that it can be misused. Indeed, if it can't misused, then it's not freedom, now is it? So in order to have freedom we must have the possibility -- even inevitability -- of its misuse. Nevertheless, woe to those who misuse it. 

But this too (i.e., woeful consequences for misuse) must be considered a gift in the overall scheme of things, because otherwise freedom is reduced to meaninglessness: if our acts don't matter, then neither does freedom. The point is, without freedom there is no ought, only is, and is is not guilty by reason of inevitability (and not meritorious for the same reason).  

So, "Freedom is a mystery on the natural level in the sense that it cannot be reduced to anything else. It is a primary datum, a supreme, most immediately known reality." 

But a true mystery on the natural level is not to be equated with mere ignorance -- as if the accumulation of natural knowledge will eventually eliminate the mystery. No, this is one of those Primordial Mysteries that point beyond themselves, above and beyond the material. 

To what? Let's stipulate that we are free. This being the case, we are free to create stuff, like machines and works of art. But are we free to create freedom? Obviously not. We can create robots, computers, and NPC progressives, but we cannot conjure freedom. Jaki concludes his chapter by suggesting that only what (whom) we call the Creator could 

create something, an act of free will, which is both fully created and in that sense "physically," that is, fully determined, and yet genuinely free at the same time.

Thus,

The mystery of free will ceases to appear a contradiction in terms, or a wholly unmanageable conundrum only when seen in the context of the infinite power and goodness of God. He created man to be free so that man's service may have that merit which only a freely performed act can have. 

Now that is a heavy responsibility. No wonder humans reject it. (We're not done with this subject, so To Be Continued.)

Infinitude: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?

In one sense, "infinite" is simply not finite, and therefore a wholly negative definition. It is also apophatic, in the sense that we know what finite things are, but again, all we can say about the infinite that it's not one of those.

Jumping ahead a bit, Schuon always deploys the infinite in a positive manner: in brief, one might say that infinitude is the first consequence or entailment of the Absolute. One can conceive of infinitude without the Absolute -- a kind of absolute chaos, I suppose -- but I can't conceive of Father Absolute without Mother Infinitude by his side. 

With those preliminary inanities out of the way, here are some passages touching on the subject, from Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God. He begins by asking whether the divine perfection is "truly infinite, and it what respects?"

As far as the traditional Christian position is concerned, the doctrine of the positive infinity of the divine perfection has been solidly established and universally recognized since the fourth century.

Prior to this -- in both scripture and in the writings of the early fathers -- "the term 'infinite' itself occurs nowhere explicitly." 

This is partly for cultural reasons, since the early fathers sought to reconcile Christianity with the best philosophical thinking available, and the Infinite "had not yet worked its way into either ordinary or philosophical vocabulary as a positive concept." That is,

In classical Greek thought, including both Plato and Aristotle, perfection was habitually identified with the finished, the well-defined or determinate -- i.e., the finite or limited -- typified by intelligible form.

Is it possible that, over two-thousand years later, we are still burdened by this devaluation of infinitude? Well, for these thinkers,

The infinite was identified with the indeterminate, the unfinished, the chaotic, the unintelligible, typified by unformed matter.  

This strikes me as straight-up misogyny, since, as we know, matter is cognate with mater, maternal, matrix (i.e., womb), and more. Mamamaya!

Now that we're on the subject, I remember a book by Alan Watts (Nature, Man and Woman), in which he traces all this to "the Sanskrit root ma- (matr-), from which, in Sanskrit itself, come both mata (mother) and maya (the phenomenal world of nature)." I don't know if that's just the LSD talking, but it's too good to check. 

The deeper -- and unarguable, in my opinion -- point is that male and female go all the way up and down in this cosmos. Don't even get me started with the centrality of Mary, not to mention Sophia-Wisdom. Or the feminine nature of the soul in relation to God. Rather, let's focus! Clarke:

It is only with Plotinus and Neoplatonism, as foreshadowed by Philo Judaeus, that the notion of a positive infinity, indicating an excess of perfection above all form and not below it, is finally worked out with clear conceptual and metaphysical precision (emboldenment mine).

Now, the first error we need to bat away is the equation of infinitude with some mere quantitative dimension -- as if we're merely talking about an infinite number of intelligible possibilities. Rather, there is a residual of infinitude in every possibility, as indicated by the fact that, for example, no one will ever get to the bottom of a single grain of sand, let alone a living or thinking being. 

Come to think of it, we have less comprehension of anything than we do everything, by which I mean that science comes up against an inevitable and impassable Wall of Unintelligibility (e.g., "what came before the Big Bang," or "where does mathematics come from?), whereas metaphysics penetrates far more deeply into the Mystery.  

Now, as I've mentioned before, I suspect there is an important link between Infinitude and our freedom, since, in a manner of speaking, the Infinite must be God's own freedom, AKA Infinite Possibility.

I suppose people don't like this idea, since it implies mutability in God. But in my opinion, we have to deny any negative connotation, and affirm a kind of eminent perfection in it. No, God's perfection does not and cannot surpass itself, but that doesn't mean it's totally static. I mean, maybe it's static, but I just can't relate to that, nor it to me.

And before you dismiss my position as sentimental nonsense, here comes Clarke to bail me out:

Here is where the Christian theological notion of God as Trinity of Persons takes on a sharp philosophical relevance. For it illustrates how God's own inner life is already rich in infinite self-expression by the Father's total gift of His own being to the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit from both as a mutual act of love.

Words like "static," "immutable," and "changeless" don't come to mind to describe this metacosmic hoedown. For it is "purely out of the joy of giving that this divine inner life can pour over to share itself with creatures." 

And now we're in a better position to understand Schuon when he writes that 

To say Absolute, is to say Infinite; Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute. It is from this “dimension” of Infinitude that the world necessarily springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude.  

Except perhaps that word necessarily, since Christian doctrine is quite clear on creation being a divine gift, not any kind of compulsory emanation. 

But I think we can clear this up by suggesting that the Creator cannot not create, otherwise the pronoun is contradictory, but that any particular creation is totally gratuitous. It's a gift, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it except acknowledge, accept, regift, and pay it forward to others in our own limited but nevertheless theomorphic way.

We'll conclude with a couple of aphorisms to ponder:

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

In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge (Dávila).

Infinitude: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?

In one sense, "infinite" is simply not finite, and therefore a wholly negative definition. It is also apophatic, in the sense that we know what finite things are, but again, all we can say about the infinite that it's not one of those.

Jumping ahead a bit, Schuon always deploys the infinite in a positive manner: in brief, one might say that infinitude is the first consequence or entailment of the Absolute. One can conceive of infinitude without the Absolute -- a kind of absolute chaos, I suppose -- but I can't conceive of Father Absolute without Mother Infinitude by his side. 

With those preliminary inanities out of the way, here are some passages touching on the subject, from Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God. He begins by asking whether the divine perfection is "truly infinite, and it what respects?"

As far as the traditional Christian position is concerned, the doctrine of the positive infinity of the divine perfection has been solidly established and universally recognized since the fourth century.

Prior to this -- in both scripture and in the writings of the early fathers -- "the term 'infinite' itself occurs nowhere explicitly." 

This is partly for cultural reasons, since the early fathers sought to reconcile Christianity with the best philosophical thinking available, and the Infinite "had not yet worked its way into either ordinary or philosophical vocabulary as a positive concept." That is,

In classical Greek thought, including both Plato and Aristotle, perfection was habitually identified with the finished, the well-defined or determinate -- i.e., the finite or limited -- typified by intelligible form.

Is it possible that, over two-thousand years later, we are still burdened by this devaluation of infinitude? Well, for these thinkers,

The infinite was identified with the indeterminate, the unfinished, the chaotic, the unintelligible, typified by unformed matter.  

This strikes me as straight-up misogyny, since, as we know, matter is cognate with mater, maternal, matrix (i.e., womb), and more. Mamamaya!

Now that we're on the subject, I remember a book by Alan Watts (Nature, Man and Woman), in which he traces all this to "the Sanskrit root ma- (matr-), from which, in Sanskrit itself, come both mata (mother) and maya (the phenomenal world of nature)." I don't know if that's just the LSD talking, but it's too good to check. 

The deeper -- and unarguable, in my opinion -- point is that male and female go all the way up and down in this cosmos. Don't even get me started with the centrality of Mary, not to mention Sophia-Wisdom. Or the feminine nature of the soul in relation to God. Rather, let's focus! Clarke:

It is only with Plotinus and Neoplatonism, as foreshadowed by Philo Judaeus, that the notion of a positive infinity, indicating an excess of perfection above all form and not below it, is finally worked out with clear conceptual and metaphysical precision (emboldenment mine).

Now, the first error we need to bat away is the equation of infinitude with some mere quantitative dimension -- as if we're merely talking about an infinite number of intelligible possibilities. Rather, there is a residual of infinitude in every possibility, as indicated by the fact that, for example, no one will ever get to the bottom of a single grain of sand, let alone a living or thinking being. 

Come to think of it, we have less comprehension of anything than we do everything, by which I mean that science comes up against an inevitable and impassable Wall of Unintelligibility (e.g., "what came before the Big Bang," or "where does mathematics come from?), whereas metaphysics penetrates far more deeply into the Mystery.  

Now, as I've mentioned before, I suspect there is an important link between Infinitude and our freedom, since, in a manner of speaking, the Infinite must be God's own freedom, AKA Infinite Possibility.

I suppose people don't like this idea, since it implies mutability in God. But in my opinion, we have to deny any negative connotation, and affirm a kind of eminent perfection in it. No, God's perfection does not and cannot surpass itself, but that doesn't mean it's totally static. I mean, maybe it's static, but I just can't relate to that, nor it to me.

And before you dismiss my position as sentimental nonsense, here comes Clarke to bail me out:

Here is where the Christian theological notion of God as Trinity of Persons takes on a sharp philosophical relevance. For it illustrates how God's own inner life is already rich in infinite self-expression by the Father's total gift of His own being to the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit from both as a mutual act of love.

Words like "static," "immutable," and "changeless" don't come to mind to describe this metacosmic hoedown. For it is "purely out of the joy of giving that this divine inner life can pour over to share itself with creatures." 

And now we're in a better position to understand Schuon when he writes that 

To say Absolute, is to say Infinite; Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute. It is from this “dimension” of Infinitude that the world necessarily springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude.  

Except perhaps that word necessarily, since Christian doctrine is quite clear on creation being a divine gift, not any kind of compulsory emanation. 

But I think we can clear this up by suggesting that the Creator cannot not create, otherwise the pronoun is contradictory, but that any particular creation is totally gratuitous. It's a gift, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it except acknowledge, accept, regift, and pay it forward to others in our own limited but nevertheless theomorphic way.

We'll conclude with a couple of aphorisms to ponder:

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

In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge (Dávila).

The Broken Circle & Your Eternal Birthday

Just some timelessly timely passages from Balthasar's Heart of the World, presented mostly without comment, although rearranged and strung together in such a way that they reveal a story, or perhaps even the story:

Prisons of finitude! Like every other being, man is born of many prisons. Soul, body, thought, intuition, endeavor; everything about him has a limit, is itself tangible limitation...

From the grilled window of the senses each person looks out to the alien things which he will never be. Even if his spirit could fly through the spaces of the world like a bird, he himself will never be this space, and the furrow which he traces in the air vanishes immediately and leaves no lasting impression. 

How far it is from one being to his closest neighbor! No one can tear down his own dungeon; no one knows who inhabits the next cell.

The mere fact of existing as an individual constitutes renunciation. The limpid mirror has been shattered, the infinite image has been shattered over the face of the world, the world has become a heap of fragments.

                                                                 ***

They were dead, so thoroughly dead that they thought they were alive.... So much the prey of sin that they had no idea what sin was. So rejected that they took themselves to be among the elect. So doomed to the abyss and the flames that they mistook the abyss for God and the flames for love.

The world was hermetically closed, closed the cycle of human life, ascending from the womb and bent on returning to the womb. Closed, too, the society of men, self-sufficient and self-satisfied.... Closed his religion, and reduced to a circle of observations and rites, prayer-formulas and sacrifices.... Closed and well-armored was the world against God from all sides.  

                                                                ***

Man wants to soar up, but the Word wants to descend. Thus will the two meet half-way, in the middle, in the place of the Mediator. But they will cross like swords cross; their wills are opposed to one another.

He beamed into the gloom, but the darkness turned away.... God came into the world, but a bristling barrier of spears and shields was his welcome. 

It was a menacing void, a chasm fitted with teeth. The light came into the darkness, but the darkness had no eye for the light: it had only jaws.

                                                       ***

And now that God's Word saw that his descent could entail nothing but his own death and ruination -- that his light must sink down into the gloom -- he accepted the battle and the declaration of war.   

And he devised the unfathomable ruse: he would plunge, like Jonas, into the monster's belly and thus penetrate to death's innermost lair; he would experience the farthest dungeon of sin's mania and drink the cup down to the dregs; he would offer his brow to man's incalculable craze for power and violence; in his own futile mission, he would demonstrate the futility of the world.... 

                                                             *** 

Suddenly all of them standing around the gallows know it: he is gone.... There is nothing more but nothingness itself. The world is dead. Love is dead. God is dead. Everything that was, was a dream dreamt by no one. The present is all past. The future is nothing. The hand has disappeared from the clock's face....

Chaos. Beyond heaven and hell. Shapeless nothingness behind the bounds of creation.

                                                             ***

But look: What is this light glimmer that wavers and begins to take form in the endless void? It has neither content nor contour. A nameless thing, more solitary than God, it emerges out of pure emptiness. It is no one. It is anterior to everything. Is it the beginning?

A wellspring in the chaos. It leaps out of pure nothingness, it leaps out of itself.... It is a beginning without parallel, as if Life were arising from Death.

Just as the first creation arose anew out of sheer nothingness, so, too, this second world -- still unborn, still caught up in its first rising -- will have its sole origin in this wound, which is never to close again. 

                                                            ***

No one is witness to the birth of a world.

All of your past is like a dream which one can no longer recall precisely, and the entire old world hangs within the new space like a picture in its frame.

And so you stare into the void. For in fact: the grave is empty, you are yourself empty.... You stare ahead of you, and behind your back stands your Life! It calls to you, you turn around and cannot recognize it. 

                                                   *** 

Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises. Here the two eons intersect. Here every ending becomes a beginning...

Bind yourself to me so irrevocably that I will be able to descend to hell with you; and then I will bind you to myself so irrevocably that, with me, you will be able to ascend to very heaven. Empty yourself out into me so completely that I can fill you with myself.

In a thunderclap I am the new creation. I am given back to myself....

                                                            *** 

And today is your Last Day (your youngest day), the newest, most childlike of days. No other day will ever be as young for you as this today, when Eternal Life has called you by name.

This Now when our two names shall have met is my birthday in eternity, and no time shall ever cease this Now. Here is where the starting point has been set. Here is creation and a new beginning.... The rigid envelope which enclosed me from the outside and preserved my emptiness now shatters to fragments...

For at last everything we can comprehend lies pitifully beneath us. And our spirit does not desire to to contain, but to be contained in you...

The Broken Circle & Your Eternal Birthday

Just some timelessly timely passages from Balthasar's Heart of the World, presented mostly without comment, although rearranged and strung together in such a way that they reveal a story, or perhaps even the story:

Prisons of finitude! Like every other being, man is born of many prisons. Soul, body, thought, intuition, endeavor; everything about him has a limit, is itself tangible limitation...

From the grilled window of the senses each person looks out to the alien things which he will never be. Even if his spirit could fly through the spaces of the world like a bird, he himself will never be this space, and the furrow which he traces in the air vanishes immediately and leaves no lasting impression. 

How far it is from one being to his closest neighbor! No one can tear down his own dungeon; no one knows who inhabits the next cell.

The mere fact of existing as an individual constitutes renunciation. The limpid mirror has been shattered, the infinite image has been shattered over the face of the world, the world has become a heap of fragments.

                                                                 ***

They were dead, so thoroughly dead that they thought they were alive.... So much the prey of sin that they had no idea what sin was. So rejected that they took themselves to be among the elect. So doomed to the abyss and the flames that they mistook the abyss for God and the flames for love.

The world was hermetically closed, closed the cycle of human life, ascending from the womb and bent on returning to the womb. Closed, too, the society of men, self-sufficient and self-satisfied.... Closed his religion, and reduced to a circle of observations and rites, prayer-formulas and sacrifices.... Closed and well-armored was the world against God from all sides.  

                                                                ***

Man wants to soar up, but the Word wants to descend. Thus will the two meet half-way, in the middle, in the place of the Mediator. But they will cross like swords cross; their wills are opposed to one another.

He beamed into the gloom, but the darkness turned away.... God came into the world, but a bristling barrier of spears and shields was his welcome. 

It was a menacing void, a chasm fitted with teeth. The light came into the darkness, but the darkness had no eye for the light: it had only jaws.

                                                       ***

And now that God's Word saw that his descent could entail nothing but his own death and ruination -- that his light must sink down into the gloom -- he accepted the battle and the declaration of war.   

And he devised the unfathomable ruse: he would plunge, like Jonas, into the monster's belly and thus penetrate to death's innermost lair; he would experience the farthest dungeon of sin's mania and drink the cup down to the dregs; he would offer his brow to man's incalculable craze for power and violence; in his own futile mission, he would demonstrate the futility of the world.... 

                                                             *** 

Suddenly all of them standing around the gallows know it: he is gone.... There is nothing more but nothingness itself. The world is dead. Love is dead. God is dead. Everything that was, was a dream dreamt by no one. The present is all past. The future is nothing. The hand has disappeared from the clock's face....

Chaos. Beyond heaven and hell. Shapeless nothingness behind the bounds of creation.

                                                             ***

But look: What is this light glimmer that wavers and begins to take form in the endless void? It has neither content nor contour. A nameless thing, more solitary than God, it emerges out of pure emptiness. It is no one. It is anterior to everything. Is it the beginning?

A wellspring in the chaos. It leaps out of pure nothingness, it leaps out of itself.... It is a beginning without parallel, as if Life were arising from Death.

Just as the first creation arose anew out of sheer nothingness, so, too, this second world -- still unborn, still caught up in its first rising -- will have its sole origin in this wound, which is never to close again. 

                                                            ***

No one is witness to the birth of a world.

All of your past is like a dream which one can no longer recall precisely, and the entire old world hangs within the new space like a picture in its frame.

And so you stare into the void. For in fact: the grave is empty, you are yourself empty.... You stare ahead of you, and behind your back stands your Life! It calls to you, you turn around and cannot recognize it. 

                                                   *** 

Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises. Here the two eons intersect. Here every ending becomes a beginning...

Bind yourself to me so irrevocably that I will be able to descend to hell with you; and then I will bind you to myself so irrevocably that, with me, you will be able to ascend to very heaven. Empty yourself out into me so completely that I can fill you with myself.

In a thunderclap I am the new creation. I am given back to myself....

                                                            *** 

And today is your Last Day (your youngest day), the newest, most childlike of days. No other day will ever be as young for you as this today, when Eternal Life has called you by name.

This Now when our two names shall have met is my birthday in eternity, and no time shall ever cease this Now. Here is where the starting point has been set. Here is creation and a new beginning.... The rigid envelope which enclosed me from the outside and preserved my emptiness now shatters to fragments...

For at last everything we can comprehend lies pitifully beneath us. And our spirit does not desire to to contain, but to be contained in you...

All There is to Know About All There Is

Just some passages I like from W. Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God, presented with or without comment. The point is, sometimes there's a man -- I won't say a Raccoon, because what's a Raccoon? -- but sometimes there's a man who, well, he fits right in here with the restauvus cosmic misfits:

As we reflect on the activities of our intellectual knowing power, we come to recognize it as an inexhaustible dynamism of inquiry, ever searching to lay hold more deeply and widely on the universe of reality. It is impossible to restrict its horizon of inquiry to any limited area of reality, to any goal short of all that there is to know about all that there is (emphasis mine).

This same idea is expressed in another book I recently read, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. First, 

realism means that our reasoning about the world around us is a participation in the reason that is actually embedded in that world.

What's the alternative? That we are intelligent, but that our intelligence reveals nothing essential about the world? 

Yes, that is the alternative: it's called nominalism, and not only is it alive and well, it has been kicking ass in various forms and iterations for several centuries. Nevertheless, what cannot go on will not go on.

As to its appeal, nominalism affirms that no natures or essences exist, which could hardly be more convenient if one wants to pretend men can be women, or that homosexuals can marry, or that we can't even know what a "woman" is, because for the nominalist there is no such thing as human (or any other) nature:

Mankind is not being prompted through his reason to steadily fulfill his nature. Rather, he is moving through the world in total freedom. There is no natural law... that emerges from within human nature itself and which provides a guide to how people ought to behave.

Superstition is a perennial temptation for fallen man, and in our day and age this superstition goes under the rubric of ideology. Every ideology is a pseudo-religion that is superimposed upon reality in order to provide a host of benefits, including a faux sense of meaning, and with it, a diminution of existential anxiety. 

The ideology is also an inexpensive signal of "intelligence" (despite being stupid), redemption-innocence (despite its depravity), and "sanity" (despite being insane; it's really just conformity, so a kind of "quantitative sanity" or safety in numbers). 

For that matter, ideology also signals virtue and caring despite being narcissistically self-enclosed, and pretends to be skeptical while being childishly credulous. 

Conversely, (orthodox, which is to say, realist) Christianity

proposes a world in which the material and temporal are united with the spiritual and eternal, in which the particular is real and solid and yet finds its intelligibility and full realization in the universal. The drive of modernity was to undo this profoundly realist, and yet ultimately mysterious and incarnational worldview.

Modern ideologies emerging from the Enlightenment amount to the imposition of a material flatland by intellectual flatheads:

It is a world that is itself without mystery, without inherent symbols or sacramental implications. It is the merely material and the merely temporal...

Ideologies are catechisms of pseudo-control and pseudo-mastery to tame and ultimately disable the intellect, allowing it maintain its slumber:   

They are attempts at categorizing the things within it so that the world can be seen to function within our thought, without remainder, with nothing left over. They are machines of thought... (emphasis mine).

In case you haven't noticed. And because they are machines, they are dead on arrival, and moreover, communicate this deadness to the sensitive soul, who will spontaneously rebel against them. (We see this happening all over the country, for example, with parents fighting back against progressive groomer ideology.) 

Bottom line:

Ideologies are religious systems for the faithless, for people who deny mystery and refuse humility.

Conservatism, whatever else it may be, should be at antipodes to ideology, since there is no philosophical system rich enough to model reality. Every ideology is a model of the world, stripped of complexity, richness, vertical depth (and height), and sundry unknown (and unKnowable) unknowns. Ideology is the precise opposite of the Cosmic Person who renders intelligence and intelligibility possible. 

Back to Clarke. The process of knowing all there is to know about all there is

continues indefinitely in ever-expanding and ever-deepening circles. As we reflect on the significance of this inexhaustible and unquenchable drive toward the fullness of all there is to know, we realize that the only adequate goal of our dynamism of knowing is the totality of all being.

Now, what -- or who -- could this be? -- this a priori present-absence that ceaselessly draws us into its vortex? One possibility is that

somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being, in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images.

I'll buy that. And "If I accept and listen to this radical innate pull of my nature as intellectual being,"

I will affirm with conviction the existence of the ultimate Fullness and Center of all being, the lodestar that draws my intelligence ever onward..., the mystery of inexhaustible Light, a Light that with my present, body-obscured vision I cannot directly penetrate or master with my own powers, but that renders all else intelligible (Clarke).  

All There is to Know About All There Is

Just some passages I like from W. Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God, presented with or without comment. The point is, sometimes there's a man -- I won't say a Raccoon, because what's a Raccoon? -- but sometimes there's a man who, well, he fits right in here with the restauvus cosmic misfits:

As we reflect on the activities of our intellectual knowing power, we come to recognize it as an inexhaustible dynamism of inquiry, ever searching to lay hold more deeply and widely on the universe of reality. It is impossible to restrict its horizon of inquiry to any limited area of reality, to any goal short of all that there is to know about all that there is (emphasis mine).

This same idea is expressed in another book I recently read, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. First, 

realism means that our reasoning about the world around us is a participation in the reason that is actually embedded in that world.

What's the alternative? That we are intelligent, but that our intelligence reveals nothing essential about the world? 

Yes, that is the alternative: it's called nominalism, and not only is it alive and well, it has been kicking ass in various forms and iterations for several centuries. Nevertheless, what cannot go on will not go on.

As to its appeal, nominalism affirms that no natures or essences exist, which could hardly be more convenient if one wants to pretend men can be women, or that homosexuals can marry, or that we can't even know what a "woman" is, because for the nominalist there is no such thing as human (or any other) nature:

Mankind is not being prompted through his reason to steadily fulfill his nature. Rather, he is moving through the world in total freedom. There is no natural law... that emerges from within human nature itself and which provides a guide to how people ought to behave.

Superstition is a perennial temptation for fallen man, and in our day and age this superstition goes under the rubric of ideology. Every ideology is a pseudo-religion that is superimposed upon reality in order to provide a host of benefits, including a faux sense of meaning, and with it, a diminution of existential anxiety. 

The ideology is also an inexpensive signal of "intelligence" (despite being stupid), redemption-innocence (despite its depravity), and "sanity" (despite being insane; it's really just conformity, so a kind of "quantitative sanity" or safety in numbers). 

For that matter, ideology also signals virtue and caring despite being narcissistically self-enclosed, and pretends to be skeptical while being childishly credulous. 

Conversely, (orthodox, which is to say, realist) Christianity

proposes a world in which the material and temporal are united with the spiritual and eternal, in which the particular is real and solid and yet finds its intelligibility and full realization in the universal. The drive of modernity was to undo this profoundly realist, and yet ultimately mysterious and incarnational worldview.

Modern ideologies emerging from the Enlightenment amount to the imposition of a material flatland by intellectual flatheads:

It is a world that is itself without mystery, without inherent symbols or sacramental implications. It is the merely material and the merely temporal...

Ideologies are catechisms of pseudo-control and pseudo-mastery to tame and ultimately disable the intellect, allowing it maintain its slumber:   

They are attempts at categorizing the things within it so that the world can be seen to function within our thought, without remainder, with nothing left over. They are machines of thought... (emphasis mine).

In case you haven't noticed. And because they are machines, they are dead on arrival, and moreover, communicate this deadness to the sensitive soul, who will spontaneously rebel against them. (We see this happening all over the country, for example, with parents fighting back against progressive groomer ideology.) 

Bottom line:

Ideologies are religious systems for the faithless, for people who deny mystery and refuse humility.

Conservatism, whatever else it may be, should be at antipodes to ideology, since there is no philosophical system rich enough to model reality. Every ideology is a model of the world, stripped of complexity, richness, vertical depth (and height), and sundry unknown (and unKnowable) unknowns. Ideology is the precise opposite of the Cosmic Person who renders intelligence and intelligibility possible. 

Back to Clarke. The process of knowing all there is to know about all there is

continues indefinitely in ever-expanding and ever-deepening circles. As we reflect on the significance of this inexhaustible and unquenchable drive toward the fullness of all there is to know, we realize that the only adequate goal of our dynamism of knowing is the totality of all being.

Now, what -- or who -- could this be? -- this a priori present-absence that ceaselessly draws us into its vortex? One possibility is that

somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being, in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images.

I'll buy that. And "If I accept and listen to this radical innate pull of my nature as intellectual being,"

I will affirm with conviction the existence of the ultimate Fullness and Center of all being, the lodestar that draws my intelligence ever onward..., the mystery of inexhaustible Light, a Light that with my present, body-obscured vision I cannot directly penetrate or master with my own powers, but that renders all else intelligible (Clarke).  

On the Genesis of Evolution & Evolution of Genesis

Creation is the nexus between eternity and history. --Dávila 

Now that we're flipping through the The One and the Many, might as well flip through to the end. Thus far we have touched on the questions of God's existence and immutability. Toward the end of the book is a chapter on The Metaphysics of Evolution, which ties these first two together nicely. 

Evolution itself is an undeniable and empirical fact: for example, at one point in cosmic history there existed no rational beings, but here we are. By virtue of what principle is our existence even possible? 

Put another way, in what kind of cosmos is it possible for free, self-aware, and truth-bearing primates to evolve into being? For just like anything else in this cosmos of ours, our existence isn't self-explanatory; rather, it obviously has a cause, but a purely material cause cannot have a spiritual effect:

Since such an immaterial nature has no material parts, but is a simple, inextended center of spiritual energy, it cannot be made out of different material parts provided by different material causes, e.g., the father cannot provide half a spiritual soul and the mother the other half... (Clarke).

Any metaphysician who actually is one recognizes that only God can create; or, if you prefer, if there is such a thing as real creation -- which is to say, of something from nothing -- then what we call "God" is its sufficient reason.

Now, creation and creativity are everywhere, at least their echoes. For which reason, in my view, the first words of Genesis are In the beginning God creates. No, not in the temporal beginning, rather, the ontological or principial beginning, which is always here and now (and cannot not be here & now). 

The point is, the metaphysical categories of creator, creation, and beginning are thoroughly entangled. Frankly, I don't see how it is possible to have one without the others: as Father and Son necessarily coarise, so too do creator and creation.  

And the most startling creation of all is of the unique individual person. We can generally understand the existence of ants, bees, and progressive atheists, but how to explain the unique individual subject?

[T]he appearance in our world of a new human being is something very special, as the Genesis story expresses imaginatively: the collaboration of heaven and earth, the earth rising up as far as it can [↑], and heaven reaching down to light a new spiritual fire in it from above [↓] -- the production of an embodied spirit that we call a human person, with a corresponding destiny extending through but beyond this whole material world.  

Again, how is this even possible?

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.

The evolution of our immaterial being is obviously a vertical and relational collaboration, otherwise it is stripped of its sufficient reason.

Some people think there can be a sufficient material explanation for such an intrinsically immaterial process, but these folks tend to be the same superstitious and conspiratorial types who troll this blog. In reality, reductive materialism

gives no adequate explanation, or even recognition, of the basic fact presented by evolutionary history, namely, that out of simpler unities new more complex ones emerge, with properties that are neither merely the sum of already existing properties of the simpler unities, nor deducible directly from them, but are distinctly on a new level.

Putting on my visionary cap, I see a vast metacosmic circle encompassing creativity-infinitude-kenosis-projection-involution on one end, and creation-exile-evolution-metanoia-return on the other. But I'm not the only one: first (ontologically, not temporally) there is 

The Journey from the Many (all finite beings), projected outward from the One, their Infinite Source, by creation....  

This is "followed" (again, ontologically) by

The Journey of the Many back towards reunion with the One, their Source, drawn by this same Source [the Great Attractor, O] through the pull of the Good built in to the very nature of every being through the mediation of final causality, which draws each being toward the fulfillment of its own nature... (ibid).

Speaking for myself, in comparison to participation in this absolutely riveting Great Circle, pretty much everything else is frankly boring, or a kind of tedious and distracting chore. We'll close with this:

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.  

So, if creation is a gift, the mystic journey is just a regift.

On the Genesis of Evolution & Evolution of Genesis

Creation is the nexus between eternity and history. --Dávila 

Now that we're flipping through the The One and the Many, might as well flip through to the end. Thus far we have touched on the questions of God's existence and immutability. Toward the end of the book is a chapter on The Metaphysics of Evolution, which ties these first two together nicely. 

Evolution itself is an undeniable and empirical fact: for example, at one point in cosmic history there existed no rational beings, but here we are. By virtue of what principle is our existence even possible? 

Put another way, in what kind of cosmos is it possible for free, self-aware, and truth-bearing primates to evolve into being? For just like anything else in this cosmos of ours, our existence isn't self-explanatory; rather, it obviously has a cause, but a purely material cause cannot have a spiritual effect:

Since such an immaterial nature has no material parts, but is a simple, inextended center of spiritual energy, it cannot be made out of different material parts provided by different material causes, e.g., the father cannot provide half a spiritual soul and the mother the other half... (Clarke).

Any metaphysician who actually is one recognizes that only God can create; or, if you prefer, if there is such a thing as real creation -- which is to say, of something from nothing -- then what we call "God" is its sufficient reason.

Now, creation and creativity are everywhere, at least their echoes. For which reason, in my view, the first words of Genesis are In the beginning God creates. No, not in the temporal beginning, rather, the ontological or principial beginning, which is always here and now (and cannot not be here & now). 

The point is, the metaphysical categories of creator, creation, and beginning are thoroughly entangled. Frankly, I don't see how it is possible to have one without the others: as Father and Son necessarily coarise, so too do creator and creation.  

And the most startling creation of all is of the unique individual person. We can generally understand the existence of ants, bees, and progressive atheists, but how to explain the unique individual subject?

[T]he appearance in our world of a new human being is something very special, as the Genesis story expresses imaginatively: the collaboration of heaven and earth, the earth rising up as far as it can [↑], and heaven reaching down to light a new spiritual fire in it from above [↓] -- the production of an embodied spirit that we call a human person, with a corresponding destiny extending through but beyond this whole material world.  

Again, how is this even possible?

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.

The evolution of our immaterial being is obviously a vertical and relational collaboration, otherwise it is stripped of its sufficient reason.

Some people think there can be a sufficient material explanation for such an intrinsically immaterial process, but these folks tend to be the same superstitious and conspiratorial types who troll this blog. In reality, reductive materialism

gives no adequate explanation, or even recognition, of the basic fact presented by evolutionary history, namely, that out of simpler unities new more complex ones emerge, with properties that are neither merely the sum of already existing properties of the simpler unities, nor deducible directly from them, but are distinctly on a new level.

Putting on my visionary cap, I see a vast metacosmic circle encompassing creativity-infinitude-kenosis-projection-involution on one end, and creation-exile-evolution-metanoia-return on the other. But I'm not the only one: first (ontologically, not temporally) there is 

The Journey from the Many (all finite beings), projected outward from the One, their Infinite Source, by creation....  

This is "followed" (again, ontologically) by

The Journey of the Many back towards reunion with the One, their Source, drawn by this same Source [the Great Attractor, O] through the pull of the Good built in to the very nature of every being through the mediation of final causality, which draws each being toward the fulfillment of its own nature... (ibid).

Speaking for myself, in comparison to participation in this absolutely riveting Great Circle, pretty much everything else is frankly boring, or a kind of tedious and distracting chore. We'll close with this:

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.  

So, if creation is a gift, the mystic journey is just a regift.

On Having Your Crock and Bleating it Too

Most of the quotes in the previous post are from W. Norris Clarke's The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysic. Not much time this morning, but I'd like to touch on a somewhat unrelated passage from the same book: 

Thus either God exists, or I am absurd. 

That's the choice on offer, so don't pretend otherwise. If it's the latter, all we ask is that you be intellectually honest and consistent: have the courage of your absence of convictions. For in the real world, God or absurdity

is the basic option that confronts me, if I am willing to go to the depth of the human condition.

(In case you were wondering why atheists are so painfully intellectually shallow, generally even prior to their self-confessed spiritual shallowness.) 

But underneath both forms of shallowness is pride and signaling. Ironically, the conspicuous confession of atheism is always a signal of intellectual superiority -- for example, yesterday's commenter, who went out of his way to tell us that "deity" is a term we use when we "just don't understand reality." The implicit point, of course, is that he does understand reality. Signal received!

But how? By virtue of what principle? And other rhetorical questions.

Many people today are afraid of facing up to this radical option [God or absurdity], and so are content to live on the surface of life...

There's nothing wrong with being shallow, on the assumption that we exist in a universe devoid of depth, i.e., with no vertical dimension. 

Now, even when I was an atheist I was always attracted to the depth -- even repulsed by shallowness -- but not yet deep enough to be cognizant of the inconsistency. Nevertheless, "It can be shown"

that there is a lived contradiction between affirming theoretically that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible...

Petey calls the latter "having your crock and eating it too." But in reality -- the reality for which our commenter claims to be the champion --  

it is finally up to each one of us either to accept his or her infinite-oriented nature as meaningful and revelatory of the real or as an opaque, illusory surd.

So, we are free to use our intelligence to choose the ultimate unintelligibility of mind, life, and existence, but that's not only an expensive signal, it's a fatal one: we had to destroy the mind in order to save the mind. 

On Having Your Crock and Bleating it Too

Most of the quotes in the previous post are from W. Norris Clarke's The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysic. Not much time this morning, but I'd like to touch on a somewhat unrelated passage from the same book: 

Thus either God exists, or I am absurd. 

That's the choice on offer, so don't pretend otherwise. If it's the latter, all we ask is that you be intellectually honest and consistent: have the courage of your absence of convictions. For in the real world, God or absurdity

is the basic option that confronts me, if I am willing to go to the depth of the human condition.

(In case you were wondering why atheists are so painfully intellectually shallow, generally even prior to their self-confessed spiritual shallowness.) 

But underneath both forms of shallowness is pride and signaling. Ironically, the conspicuous confession of atheism is always a signal of intellectual superiority -- for example, yesterday's commenter, who went out of his way to tell us that "deity" is a term we use when we "just don't understand reality." The implicit point, of course, is that he does understand reality. Signal received!

But how? By virtue of what principle? And other rhetorical questions.

Many people today are afraid of facing up to this radical option [God or absurdity], and so are content to live on the surface of life...

There's nothing wrong with being shallow, on the assumption that we exist in a universe devoid of depth, i.e., with no vertical dimension. 

Now, even when I was an atheist I was always attracted to the depth -- even repulsed by shallowness -- but not yet deep enough to be cognizant of the inconsistency. Nevertheless, "It can be shown"

that there is a lived contradiction between affirming theoretically that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible...

Petey calls the latter "having your crock and eating it too." But in reality -- the reality for which our commenter claims to be the champion --  

it is finally up to each one of us either to accept his or her infinite-oriented nature as meaningful and revelatory of the real or as an opaque, illusory surd.

So, we are free to use our intelligence to choose the ultimate unintelligibility of mind, life, and existence, but that's not only an expensive signal, it's a fatal one: we had to destroy the mind in order to save the mind. 

God, the Ultimate Jazz Trio

Let's begin with a couple of aphoristical barbs from the nonlocal pen of Petey: 

Every metaphysician knows that God is the supreme cause of all effects. But what's the harm in taking the next step and affirming that he must thereby be the supreme effect of all causes? 

God is person, meaning that Person is the ultimate category and principle. But "Person" and "immutable" are antithetical.

As promised in a comment yesterday, I want to highlight some passages from one of my favorite theologians, W. Norris Clarke, drawn from various sources, including Person and Being, The One and the Many, The Philosophical Approach to God, and Explorations in Metaphysics. 

Some of these are exact quotes, others plagiaphrased or combined. At the conclusion we'll try to bring them all together and figure out what they mean, all the while staying within the traditional guardrails of orthodoxy and orthodox guardrails of tradition.

Where to begin... How about here:

To say that God is "all powerful" does not mean that He alone holds and exercises all power, but only that He is the ultimate source of all power...

And

To say that God is the creator of all things does not mean that He directly creates all the acts of creatures. God creates agents, beings with active natures -- or, if you wish, beings acting, not acts.  

It's one thing to create an inanimate rock or an insentient progressive NPC and be done with it, another thing entirely to create a free and creative being. Then there's no end to the trouble. In any event,

The fact that all creatures are totally dependent on God both in their being and in their actions does not therefore mean that God determines their actions from without.  

We are not Mohammedan occasionalists or scientistic determinists or Calvinist double-determinists. More to the point, we would like to preserve God's innocence of man's stupidity and depravity, which is impossible to do if God is ultimately directly responsible for every stupid and depraved human action. For God on the one hand 

communicates to creatures their own being and their own native power and supports them in its use, so that without Him they could neither exist nor act.  

BUT

since He really has given them a share in His own power, they determine the use to which this power is put, even to use it against the express conditional will of God (= sin). This is a free self-limitation of God's exercise of His own unlimited power.

This resolves so many otherwise insoluble metaphysical problems, that I personally have no hesitation in taking it on board. 

Moreover, this doesn't mean that the Divine Will isn't realized, only that it is necessarily mediated by human nature. As they say, God writes straight with lyin' crooks. 

"The actual carrying out of divine providence," writes Clarke, takes place -- in a manner of speaking -- "by persuasion, by luring to the good -- not by coercion." For God is not an authoritarian leftist. He is, for example, the very basis of free speech, even while knowing full well that our snowflake crybullies will inevitably be triggered by it. 

And the best part is, this is all fits into Orthodoxy, so long as we maintain a little perspective and keep things in their proper place:

All that an orthodox Christian must hold today with respect to predestination is that God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe, and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by his suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail just whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.  

The following may be a bit ill-sounding, but let's suppose that

Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous "improvisation" of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama.

Now that is really speaking my (musical) language, because while there's no harm in seeing the cosmos as a grand symphony composed by the divine mind, I'm much more of a jazz guy, so the following is for me right in the pocket: God

might be said -- in an at first perhaps shocking, but to me illuminating metaphor -- to be the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds.

Not only do I believe this, I can't not believe it, so it's good to know it can easily be harmonized with orthodoxy. Bottom line for today:

The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our ongoing now's.

And the ultimate jazz trio must be -- you guessed it -- the Trinity. 

But that last passage also reminds me of Duke Ellington in particular, who not only combined structure and improvisation in his compositions, but specifically wrote to the strengths and weaknesses of his particular musicians, allowing them a degree of freedom to carry out what he had in mind for them. They might even have thought they were totally improvising, unaware that they were actually freely carrying out the composer's intent.

God, the Ultimate Jazz Trio

Let's begin with a couple of aphoristical barbs from the nonlocal pen of Petey: 

Every metaphysician knows that God is the supreme cause of all effects. But what's the harm in taking the next step and affirming that he must thereby be the supreme effect of all causes? 

God is person, meaning that Person is the ultimate category and principle. But "Person" and "immutable" are antithetical.

As promised in a comment yesterday, I want to highlight some passages from one of my favorite theologians, W. Norris Clarke, drawn from various sources, including Person and Being, The One and the Many, The Philosophical Approach to God, and Explorations in Metaphysics. 

Some of these are exact quotes, others plagiaphrased or combined. At the conclusion we'll try to bring them all together and figure out what they mean, all the while staying within the traditional guardrails of orthodoxy and orthodox guardrails of tradition.

Where to begin... How about here:

To say that God is "all powerful" does not mean that He alone holds and exercises all power, but only that He is the ultimate source of all power...

And

To say that God is the creator of all things does not mean that He directly creates all the acts of creatures. God creates agents, beings with active natures -- or, if you wish, beings acting, not acts.  

It's one thing to create an inanimate rock or an insentient progressive NPC and be done with it, another thing entirely to create a free and creative being. Then there's no end to the trouble. In any event,

The fact that all creatures are totally dependent on God both in their being and in their actions does not therefore mean that God determines their actions from without.  

We are not Mohammedan occasionalists or scientistic determinists or Calvinist double-determinists. More to the point, we would like to preserve God's innocence of man's stupidity and depravity, which is impossible to do if God is ultimately directly responsible for every stupid and depraved human action. For God on the one hand 

communicates to creatures their own being and their own native power and supports them in its use, so that without Him they could neither exist nor act.  

BUT

since He really has given them a share in His own power, they determine the use to which this power is put, even to use it against the express conditional will of God (= sin). This is a free self-limitation of God's exercise of His own unlimited power.

This resolves so many otherwise insoluble metaphysical problems, that I personally have no hesitation in taking it on board. 

Moreover, this doesn't mean that the Divine Will isn't realized, only that it is necessarily mediated by human nature. As they say, God writes straight with lyin' crooks. 

"The actual carrying out of divine providence," writes Clarke, takes place -- in a manner of speaking -- "by persuasion, by luring to the good -- not by coercion." For God is not an authoritarian leftist. He is, for example, the very basis of free speech, even while knowing full well that our snowflake crybullies will inevitably be triggered by it. 

And the best part is, this is all fits into Orthodoxy, so long as we maintain a little perspective and keep things in their proper place:

All that an orthodox Christian must hold today with respect to predestination is that God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe, and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by his suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail just whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.  

The following may be a bit ill-sounding, but let's suppose that

Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous "improvisation" of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama.

Now that is really speaking my (musical) language, because while there's no harm in seeing the cosmos as a grand symphony composed by the divine mind, I'm much more of a jazz guy, so the following is for me right in the pocket: God

might be said -- in an at first perhaps shocking, but to me illuminating metaphor -- to be the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds.

Not only do I believe this, I can't not believe it, so it's good to know it can easily be harmonized with orthodoxy. Bottom line for today:

The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our ongoing now's.

And the ultimate jazz trio must be -- you guessed it -- the Trinity. 

But that last passage also reminds me of Duke Ellington in particular, who not only combined structure and improvisation in his compositions, but specifically wrote to the strengths and weaknesses of his particular musicians, allowing them a degree of freedom to carry out what he had in mind for them. They might even have thought they were totally improvising, unaware that they were actually freely carrying out the composer's intent.

Taking God Personally: Omniscience is Omnipathos

In my hiatal state, I've been dwelling on this conundrum of God's supposed immutability. We've discussed it in the past, but for some reason the subject has lately been coming back to haunt me. So I reread a number of dissenting voices, including Charles Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity. 

Harthsorne has a lot of ideas with which I profoundly disagree, but on those which we do agree, we really agree. Here are some plagiaphrased passages from the book, presented mostly without comment. 

--Divine relativity is not only compatible with, but equivalent to, an aspect of divine absoluteness. The Absolute is God with something left out of account. The Absolute is, rather, an abstract feature of the inclusive and supreme reality which is precisely the personal God.

--The higher one goes in the scale of being, the more obviously do the social aspects assume a primary role. Does this point to the conclusion that the supreme being is not social at all?

--God, if social, is eminently or supremely so. For all other beings limit their compassion at some point. I assert that the closest to zero dependence would occur at the bottom, not the top of the scale of beings. The closer we get to a "merely material" individual, the closer we come to something for which nearly all the changes in the universe make no appreciable difference at all.

--God is socially aware, period. 

--Sympathetic dependence is a sign of excellence and increases with every ascent in the scale of being. What does it mean to know what sorrow is, but never to have sorrowed, never to have felt the quality of suffering?

--The eminent form of sympathetic dependence can only apply to deity, for this form cannot be less than OMNISCIENT SYMPATHY.

--Conversely, it is the tyrant who depends as little as possible, ideally not at all, upon the wills and fortunes of others. Likewise, the father who as little as possible depends upon the will and welfare of his child is an inhuman monster.

--Yet God, we are told, is impassive and immutable and without accidents, and is therefore just as he would be had we never existed, or had all our experiences been otherwise.

--Suppose I can be equally happy and serene and joyous regardless of how men and women suffer around me. Shall we admire this alleged independence? I think not. Why should we admire it when it is alleged of God?

--The relative or changeable exceeds the nonrelative, immutable or absolute, as the concrete includes and exceeds the abstract.

--A personal God is one who has social relations and thus is constituted by relationships and hence is relative. 

--What is a person if not a being qualified and conditioned by social relations, relations to other persons? And what is God if not the supreme case of personality? Either God really does love all beings, that is, is related to them by a sympathetic union surpassing all human sympathy, or religion seems a vast fraud.

--To say, on the one hand, that God is love, and on the other, to speak of an absolute, infinite, immutable, impassive deity, seems a gigantic hoax.

--God has qualities that are accidental, that do not follow from any necessity of his essence.

--It simply cannot be that everything in God is necessary, including his knowledge that this world exists, unless the world is in the same sense necessary and there is no contingency whatsoever. 

--If God is wholly absolute, it follows that God does not know or love or will us, his creatures. 

Either he has relative being, and then we might know it, or he has only absolute being, in which case only He could know it.

--The perfect being either does, or does not, include the totality of imperfect things. If the perfect does not include the totality of imperfect things, then this total reality is a greater reality than the perfect alone.

Bottom line(s):

For God to do what I do when I decide my own act is mere nonsense, words without meaning. It is not my act if anyone else decides or performs it...

[I]t is impossible that our act should be both free and yet a logical consequence of divine action which "infallibly" produces its effect. Power to cause someone to perform by his own choice an act precisely defined by the cause is meaningless.

The notion of a cosmic power that determines all decisions fails to make sense. For its decisions could refer to nothing except themselves. they could result in no world; for a world must consist of local agents making their own decisions

Therefore,

Maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as the supreme person.

Conversely, if God be in all aspects absolute, then literally it is "all the same" to him, a matter of utter indifference. This is precisely not to be personal in any way relevant to religion or ethics. A wholly absolute God is power divorced from responsiveness or sensitivity.

Me? I think the whole mess can be cleaned up by looking at things through the lenses of Trinity and Incarnation.  

Taking God Personally: Omniscience is Omnipathos

In my hiatal state, I've been dwelling on this conundrum of God's supposed immutability. We've discussed it in the past, but for some reason the subject has lately been coming back to haunt me. So I reread a number of dissenting voices, including Charles Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity. 

Harthsorne has a lot of ideas with which I profoundly disagree, but on those which we do agree, we really agree. Here are some plagiaphrased passages from the book, presented mostly without comment. 

--Divine relativity is not only compatible with, but equivalent to, an aspect of divine absoluteness. The Absolute is God with something left out of account. The Absolute is, rather, an abstract feature of the inclusive and supreme reality which is precisely the personal God.

--The higher one goes in the scale of being, the more obviously do the social aspects assume a primary role. Does this point to the conclusion that the supreme being is not social at all?

--God, if social, is eminently or supremely so. For all other beings limit their compassion at some point. I assert that the closest to zero dependence would occur at the bottom, not the top of the scale of beings. The closer we get to a "merely material" individual, the closer we come to something for which nearly all the changes in the universe make no appreciable difference at all.

--God is socially aware, period. 

--Sympathetic dependence is a sign of excellence and increases with every ascent in the scale of being. What does it mean to know what sorrow is, but never to have sorrowed, never to have felt the quality of suffering?

--The eminent form of sympathetic dependence can only apply to deity, for this form cannot be less than OMNISCIENT SYMPATHY.

--Conversely, it is the tyrant who depends as little as possible, ideally not at all, upon the wills and fortunes of others. Likewise, the father who as little as possible depends upon the will and welfare of his child is an inhuman monster.

--Yet God, we are told, is impassive and immutable and without accidents, and is therefore just as he would be had we never existed, or had all our experiences been otherwise.

--Suppose I can be equally happy and serene and joyous regardless of how men and women suffer around me. Shall we admire this alleged independence? I think not. Why should we admire it when it is alleged of God?

--The relative or changeable exceeds the nonrelative, immutable or absolute, as the concrete includes and exceeds the abstract.

--A personal God is one who has social relations and thus is constituted by relationships and hence is relative. 

--What is a person if not a being qualified and conditioned by social relations, relations to other persons? And what is God if not the supreme case of personality? Either God really does love all beings, that is, is related to them by a sympathetic union surpassing all human sympathy, or religion seems a vast fraud.

--To say, on the one hand, that God is love, and on the other, to speak of an absolute, infinite, immutable, impassive deity, seems a gigantic hoax.

--God has qualities that are accidental, that do not follow from any necessity of his essence.

--It simply cannot be that everything in God is necessary, including his knowledge that this world exists, unless the world is in the same sense necessary and there is no contingency whatsoever. 

--If God is wholly absolute, it follows that God does not know or love or will us, his creatures. 

Either he has relative being, and then we might know it, or he has only absolute being, in which case only He could know it.

--The perfect being either does, or does not, include the totality of imperfect things. If the perfect does not include the totality of imperfect things, then this total reality is a greater reality than the perfect alone.

Bottom line(s):

For God to do what I do when I decide my own act is mere nonsense, words without meaning. It is not my act if anyone else decides or performs it...

[I]t is impossible that our act should be both free and yet a logical consequence of divine action which "infallibly" produces its effect. Power to cause someone to perform by his own choice an act precisely defined by the cause is meaningless.

The notion of a cosmic power that determines all decisions fails to make sense. For its decisions could refer to nothing except themselves. they could result in no world; for a world must consist of local agents making their own decisions

Therefore,

Maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as the supreme person.

Conversely, if God be in all aspects absolute, then literally it is "all the same" to him, a matter of utter indifference. This is precisely not to be personal in any way relevant to religion or ethics. A wholly absolute God is power divorced from responsiveness or sensitivity.

Me? I think the whole mess can be cleaned up by looking at things through the lenses of Trinity and Incarnation.