Miracles and Openings

In religious circles time tends to get a bad rap, no doubt due to that whole aging and dying thingy. As a consequence, there is a disproportionate valuation of eternity, as if time isn't in eternity and vice versa.

Or at least that's what I suspect, so I was pleased to read in Schindler how Balthasar "insists that the trinitarian life of God contains the 'original idea' of time." In short, if "something is happening" in the Trinity, then something analogous occurs in our experience of time.

Of this High Time, Schindler suggests that "The 'present' of the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father is an 'always-already having been' from the Father which is inclusive of an 'eternal future' for the Father."

To demythologize this somewhat, the present is always a kind of creative begetting from the source or ground. But this creative begetting has never not been, thus the "past." And it will never end, thus the "future." The vector of time is something like conception -> birth -> fulfillment, in a circular movement very much at odds with the idea of the "motionless mover."

For Schindler, this triple movement is "infinitely intensified in God." Instead of an eternal stasis in which God is the ultimate flatliner, the picture emerges of "eternal motion or 'movingness.' Rather than saying there is no becoming in God, one should speak instead of the 'super-becoming of the innerly-divine event.'"

Easy for me to say, since I cannot comprehend God in any other way. If "life within God" were "eternally the same," this "would imply a kind of everlasting boredom," or an eternal snoozefest. That's not slack, that's just unconsciousness.

Thus, I couldn't agree more that "God's trinitarian life is a 'liveliness' characterized by the always new and by 'surprise.'" Indeed, it is "a 'communion of surprise' (in the sense of an infinite ever-flowing fulfillment)."

You know, this is precisely what jazz is supposed to be, at least the kind I enjoy: a communion of musical surprise. I can't imagine the boredom of a musician having to play the same songs in the same way in every performance, night after night.

Demythologizing -- or just abstracting -- again, if the Father is "active action," then the Son is "passive action." The latter is by no means mere passivity, but rather, active receptiveness to the outflowing presence of the other.

I can relate to this somewhat, because this is what one does as a psychotherapist: one listens to the patient -- or attends to his or her presence -- in an actively passive way. "Listening with the third ear," as one psychoanalyst put it.

Similarly, Bion recommended suspending memory, desire, and understanding so as to be able to fully attend to the moment in a creatively open manner. Isn't this also the appropriate attitude for approaching scripture? For there the idea is not to superimpose a grid of predigested meaning, but rather, to have a real encounter with another Wording Presence.

"Activity and passivity in God are thus always-already different because of their relation to each other: activity is not 'merely' active, nor is passivity 'merely' passive." Rather, each is conditioned by, or in the context of, a love that really comes down to a mutual gift-giving.

Returning to the main theme, the divine movement described above is not some kind of defect "to be eliminated by eternity," but rather, a positive resulting in "an infinite deepening and intensification in eternity." Again, this is not the absolute negation of time, but rather, its very basis.

Otherwise neither time nor eternity make any human sense at all. Time becomes pointless and absurd, while eternity becomes... well, it doesn't become at all. The former is endless nothingness, while the latter is a nothingness forever.

But assuming the old formula of the Fathers, that "God becomes man so that man might become God," in more practical terms we might say that eternity becomes time so that time might become eternal. And it does so through God's mighty memory.

"Theory or contemplation become vacancy or boredom, or again, interiority becomes emptiness, for the person whose time has not been filled with eternity, and the form of whose life has not been invested 'with lucid stillness.'"

I'm thinking... this may help make sense of a provocative Schuonism I've been puzzling over for the last several days. Won't know unless I try.

It is in the context of a discussion of the miraculous in the book From the Divine to the Human, in which he says that "A miracle is like a sunrise: it pre-exists in the divine order and it manifests only in conjunction with a human opening."

In other words, the earth is always rotating, so the sun is always "rising" somewhere, depending upon the "human opening." Indeed, there is no such thing as a "sunrise" in the absence of a human observer, for in reality, "the sun is fixed in relation to the earth."

Now, if we jump up a cosmic octave, it is as if Nature is "a moving veil before an immutable supernature." As this veil of nature moves before supernature, all sorts of interesting things flow down and in.

Most importantly, the miracle as such "is prefigured by the eruption of life into matter, and all the more so by the eruption of intelligence both into matter and into life," to say nothing of "the eruption of Revelation" into intelligence.

Thus, there are outward miracles and inward miracles, but the former are always for the sake of the latter, which is ultimately "the divine Presence in the soul." However, here again, this divine presence is like the "eternal sunrise" which is only present for a human opening. But I still think it moves, in the same sense that the sun actually "moves," if only via its benevolent radiation of light.

From Foolish Knowledge to Learned Ignorance

Here's an orthoparadoxical thought to start your week with a headache: "The more the persons differentiate themselves in God, the greater is their unity" (Adrienne von Speyr, in Schindler). In etherworlds, "Unity and difference within the Trinity... are not inversely but directly related," such that it is a kind of eternally inspiraling -- and fortunately for us, outspiraling -- "evermore."

That is soooo different from any static and unchanging conception of God. This goes to the difference between orthoparadox and plain old paradox. An example of the latter is to define God as unchanging, and then go on to say that he cares about us, or suffers with us, or hates evil, or even "creates," creation being inconceivable in the absence of change.

We've circled this goround before, but why not just say that God is always All and yet allwise Evermore? This doesn't imply any deficit or "lack"; to the contrary, it implies an excess of love, of light, of creativity.

This is pretty much what Raccoon emeritus professor of orthoparadoxical studies, Meister Eckhart, says. Around here we give great deference to Professor Eckhart, because that guy was nuts! In fact, he was nuts enough to believe that "philosophy and theology did not contradict each other" -- however, not in such a way that theology is dragged down to the level of profane philosophy, but rather, that theology goes positively nuts:

"[E]verything that is true, whether in being or in knowing, in scripture or in nature, proceeds from one source and one root of truth." Or again, "All knowers know God implicitly in all they know" (Jean Leclercq). You can't know without re-membering a bit of God, no matter how hard you try to forget.

However, at the same time, Eckhart could affirm his amazement "that scripture is so rich that no one has ever penetrated to the ground of the least word of it."

Hear again, understanding cannot be reduced on the one hand to any kind of bonehead positivism or scientism, or on the other, to any kind of theological literalism. As if infinite truth can be so easily contained by finite man! Rather, both Bible and World -- each being a creative revelation -- contain "an inexhaustible fecundity of truths."

This is why the Raccoon is the most modest of all self-aggrandizing gnosis-alls, in that he is simply a lover of wisdom and seeker after truth. He is in love with Love -- the love of truth -- whereas far more laughty souls than ours are in love with eternal tenure.

Thus the eternally self-surpassing orthoparadox that "the only way to gain God is by constant unfulfilled pursuit" (McGinn). Looked at this way, the Raccoon is a much bigger atheist than any so-called atheist! For "it is of the very nature of the Divine Word to be hidden in its revelation and revealed in its hiddenness" (ibid.).

It's like any other game, wherein the point of the game is... the game. If you should "win," then it just means the game is over and then so too is the fun.

This, I think, explains the essential grimness of the left. They not only possess the truth, but it is a very unpleasant truth. They can try to make it funny, but they just come off as tasteless or clueless or mean-spirited, like the Jew-bashing humor of the Muslim world.

The systematic unKnowing of God, although it is "an uncomprehending, it still has more within it than in all knowing and comprehending outside it, for this unknowing lures and draws you from all that is known, and also from yourself" (Eckhart, in McGinn).

Think about it: any animal can and does merely know. But only a man can unKnow. There is of course an "ignorance" beneath knowledge, but there is also transknowing above, or we would be too stupid to know nothing.

I was actually looking for a passage that goes to what was said above about the "evermore" of the Trinity, and how this must be reflected in man. The following comes close, that "The eternal birth occurs in the soul precisely as it does in eternity... for it is one birth, and this birth occurs in the essence of and ground of the soul." Thus, like the Son, we are born again... and again, and again, and again...

For "The Father's speaking is his giving birth; the Son's hearing is his being born."

So, glory to the nowborn king.

Truth and "Truth," Freedom and "Freedom"

Yesterday we spoke of how the ultimate reality is being-for, being-from, and being-with, AKA Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But modernity is founded upon a denial of this reality, such that there is no fundamental being-from, nor a being-with, just a being from, with, and for myself only. Or just say a culture of narcissism.

Remember, the tragedy of Narcissus is that he is enclosed in the orbit of his own image. To the right we see him lovingly admiring his own reflection, like Obama gazing into his own selfie. It is not so much the gaze that is important, but rather, the space in between, which forms the horizon of his subjectivity. It shows how Narcissus condemns himself to an ontological prison in which he is forever from, for, and with himself, in a closed circle. It's what we call cosmic ønanism.

Paraphrasing Ratzinger, this is how man, instead of being in the image of the Creator, becomes his own idol. Such auto-idolatry "is the image of what Christian tradition would call the devil -- the anti-God -- because it harbors exactly the radical antithesis to the real God."

Thus, to the extent that we "liberate" ourselves from our divine prototype, we open the way "to dehumanization, to the destruction of being itself through the destruction of truth." Any radical liberation movement, whether Marxism, feminism, homosexualism, etc., ends up "a rebellion against man's very being, a rebellion against truth, which consequently leads man... into a self-contradictory existence which we call hell."

You know the old gag, "I don't believe in miracles, I only rely on them." Well, I don't believe in hell or the devil, I just struggle against their annoying powers and principalities every day.

About the self-contradictory nature of modernity. Me, I can't stand contradictions. If I detect one in my melon, I feel compelled to resolve it, or synthesize it at a higher level (or formulate an irreducible orthoparadox).

For example, the typical modern sophisticate will generally hold an implicit metaphysic which simultaneously renders freedom impossible while elevating it to a kind of absolute value. He never pauses to inquire into the real nature of freedom, i.e., what it is, how it got here, what we're supposed to do with it, etc.

But as Ratzinger says, "freedom is tied to a measure, the measure of reality," which is to say, "to the truth." Thus, "freedom to destroy oneself or to destroy another is not freedom, but its demonic parody." In short, freedom is not the measure of man, for if so, man truly is a big nothing, just as that big nobody Sartre said. Rather, man must be the measure of freedom, "otherwise it annuls itself."

Imagine believing that, since we are free to eat anything we want, we can live on sawdust and grass clippings. This obviously won't work, because our body is what it is, so our freedom to eat is conditioned by that prior truth.

The upshot is that just as there can be no I in the absence of the prior We, there can be no freedom in the absence of the prior Truth. Furthermore, the immediate implication is that freedom not only implies responsibility, but that responsibility is prior to truth. Here again, this is illuminated by Genesis, which shows that with man's freedom comes responsibility. But Adam prefers freedom without responsibility, and off we go.

"The truth shall set you free." This radical and revolutionary statement has not only lost its power to shock, but is probably ignored by most people. But to turn it around, the absence of truth means the absence of freedom. Thus, the Lie enslaves, the biggest and most tenured lie of all being the postmodern idea that there is no such thing as truth, only "truth" and therefore only "freedom."

Ratzinger calls this counterfeit freedom "a regulated form of injustice." For example, if we have a radical right to "sexual freedom," this means that human sexuality has no order, no telos, no reason except for one enclosed in Narcissus' own reflection. Being that this imprisonment is a "right," the right must be enforced, which is how it becomes against the law to decline to cater a make-believe marriage, or for a psychologist try to help a person overcome his homosexual urges. In the modern world, regulated injustice masquerades as freedom.

We only give a child more freedom as they prove themselves responsible enough to deal with it. Why then do leftists call for the "liberation" of Palestinian savages? Or, why does Obama treat morally insane mullahs as responsible adults?

We might say that truth is not in man per se, but reflected in man. Analogously, the moon is not the sun, but the light that reflects from it is not other than the sun. Thus, man must orient himself to the truth, and conduct himself in light of it. Ultimately our freedom exists in the space between us and God, which again is the antithesis of the narcissistically self-enclosed and self-regarding "freedom" of liberalism.

"Responsibility would thus mean to live our being as an answer -- as a response to what we are in truth.... This truth becomes visible in the mirror of God's essence, because man can be rightly understood only in relation to God." For real freedom is "the fusion of our being with the divine being..." (Ratzinger).

You Can Learn a Lot from a Baby

Picking up exactly where we left off yesterday, I would put it this way: "I" and "we" are never found apart, and yet, the "we" must be ontologically prior.

Even so, this terrestrial "we" will form a closed circle unless it can somehow participate in the Cosmic We, and this cannot happen unless the higher We breaks into the lower, so to speak, in order to draw us into this infinitely wider orbit of eros. This is apparently what Petey meant by that crack about pointing our eros into the heart of the son and then just holding on for dear life.

This is encapsulated in the formula of through Christ in the Holy Spirit to the Father, in a kind of sweeping metacosmic movement. Each preposition is equally necessary -- through, in, and to -- and strikes me as analogous to formal (Son), efficient (Holy Spirit), and final (Father) causation. And final causation is the "cause of causes"; if it is chronologically last it is always ontologically first. And the last shall be first!

Later in the book, in a different essay, Ratzinger makes the point that "to pray is not just to talk, but also to listen."

Again, this presupposes the We, such that "This act of leaving the circle of our own words and our own desires, this drawing back of the I, this self-abandonment to the mysterious presence which awaits us -- this more than anything constitutes prayer."

Self-abandonment to the mysterious presence. We'll come back to this at some point. Maybe tomorrow.

Was it just yesterday that Hillary Clinton referred to marriage as "the fundamental bedrock principle that exists between a man and a woman, going back into the mists of history as one of the founding, foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization"?

I have a question: how does one escape from a bedrock principle without suffering brain damage or becoming an entirely different person? For what is a principle, anyway?

First of all, the qualifier "bedrock" is superfluous, since all principles are founded on rock; they are the rock -- or sand, depending -- upon which thought builds its cathedral -- or trailer home, depending.

To say that a person is "unprincipled" is to say that he is -- yes, a Clinton, but beyond that, someone who derives his so-called principles from the moment-to-moment requirements of power. Thus, the real principle is power, and certainly not truth.

But a Clinton is just a synecdoche.. bag... of the postmodern mentality. As Professor Schmitz writes, in our age "the very conception of a principle" -- one might say "the very 'principle' of principle" -- "has come under increasing challenge." To put it mildly.

It seems that a bedcrock of modern liberalism is that principles somehow limit our freedom instead of enabling and perfecting it. This would explain Hillary's Houdini trick of slipping free of her own principles, since a higher principle is at stake, the unholy trinity of narcissism, nihilism, and nominalism, the sum of which seals us in a badrock of immanence.

Returning to Ratzinger, he discusses how abortion follows from the principle of no principles, for the "right" of a mother to kill her baby is founded upon a radical separation of the two, in which the fetus must be reduced to a kind of aggressive parasite in order to justify its destruction.

But this argument is ultimately grounded in the inviolability of the radically separate I of postmodernity. In reality, to destroy a baby is to destroy a mother, but since there is "no such thing as a baby," it is really to undermine the principle of principles, the primordial We that is our ground of being, both vertically and horizontally.

As Ratzinger describes it, the being of the baby is surely dependent upon the being of the mother, but this is not an argument for separation, rather, for a sacred unity of otherness: the distorted unity ("it's the mother's body") "does not eliminate the otherness of this being" or authorize "us to dispute its distinct selfhood," for this selfhood-in-other is the very form of our existence. Motherhood is a being-for, which countermands the "desire to be an independent self and is thus experienced as the antithesis of [the woman's] own freedom."

But this is the Way It Is. Nothing magically changes outside the womb, in that the baby retains the form of a "being-from" and a "being-with" who is "just as dependent on, and at the mercy of, a being-for." Mother of mercy!

However, it is not as if we ever outgrow the form of our being-from and being-with. Rather, "the child in the mother's womb is simply a very graphic depiction of human existence in general," for "even the adult can exist only with and from another, and is thus continually thrown back on that being-for which is the very thing he would like to shut out" (emphasis mine).

Indeed, this denial of our being-for, -with, and -to the cosmic Being-From, AKA God, is yet another iteration of the Fall.

Bottom line for today's scattered post: "The radical cry for freedom demands man's liberation from his very essence as man, so that he may become the 'new man.' In the new society, the dependencies that restrict the I and the necessity of self-giving would no longer have the right to exist.

"'Ye shall be as gods.' This promise is quite clearly behind modernity's radical demand for freedom" (Ratzinger).

Adam & Eve & Atom & Wave

Today's post was cut short in its prime by an unexpectedly early appointment.

In a comment yesterday Van mentioned the Greek contribution to the concept of person. Did we not touch on this in our lengthy discussion of Inventing the Individual? I don't exactly remember.

I believe we did, but from a slightly different angle, in that Siedentop discusses how the individual becomes more individuated -- more interiorized -- as a consequence of Christianity's emphasis on the value of the person, i.e., our equality before God and on our freedom of conscience. But in the wider ancient world, the individual was still very much subordinated to the family and/or city.

Ratzinger notes that even "Boethius's concept of person, which prevailed in Western philosophy, must be criticized as entirely insufficient," because it remains "on the level of the Greek mind." Which is to say, person is regarded as "the individual substance of a rational nature." In short, "person stands entirely on the level of substance," a metaparasitic error which continues to infect contemporary left-liberalism.

In contrast, Christianity teaches that person is relation, not substance; or, he is irreducibly substance-in-relation, never an isolated, atomistic I-land. If he were a radically enclosed atom, then he would always be one. In other words, the Raccoon affirms that substance and relation are complementary, not polarized. However, of the two, relation is the more fundamental, because it encompasses substance, whereas substance cannot encompass relation.

Note, for example, that Eve is of the same substance as Adam -- taken from his rib -- and thus intrinsically related. It would appear that this same pattern extends all the way down to the farthest reaches of matter, with the wave-particle complementarity. Particles are abstracted from waves, but are always nonlocally related to one another. So Adam & Eve are like atom & wave. Or rather, vice versa.

But we're just being silly.

Oh really? What, you know better than God how the cosmos is structured?

For Ratzinger, Christ is not the ontological exception, but rather, the rule. He is here to show us the Way Things Are and the Way To Get There. He even discusses this in the context of modern physics, wherein the scientific annoymaly is "very often the symptom that shows us the insufficiency of our previous schema of order, which helps us to break open this schema and to conquer a new realm of reality."

If only 19th century physicists had listened to Jesus instead of falling into a mechanistic metaphysic! Then again, if they had, then Germany would have had the atom bomb before World War I, so forget that.

Let's call it the Christwave. For in the words of Ratzinger, Christ "is the integrating space in which the 'we' of human beings gathers itself toward the 'you' of God." Again, this is not as simple as the so-called I-thou relation, because that still implies two separate beings that are then brought into relation. But for Ratzinger,

"On both sides there is neither the pure 'I,' or the pure 'you.'" Rather, for both sides "the 'I' is integrated into the greater 'we.'" Thus, not even God hiselves "can be seen as the pure and simple 'I' toward which the human tends"; you might say that there can be no I AM in the absence of a prior We Are -- which again goes to everything we have said about the mother-infant relation.

This is precisely what lends a kind of dignity to everything, to creation itself. That is, "The Christian concept of God has as a matter of principle given the same dignity to multiplicity as to unity." Conversely, the ancients -- but also neoplatonists, Buddhists, and other boring monologues -- "considered multiplicity the corruption of unity." But Christianity "considers multiplicity as belonging to unity with the same dignity."

You might say that the Incarnation is simply the Last Word in this elevation of matter and mayaplicity. I remember Alan Watts talking about how matter is related to mater. For Christians, it is certainly the case that the ultimate principle is planted right here in the womb -- the matrix -- of matter, in an act of wholly matterimany resulting in a mamafestivus for the restavus. It is very much as if we cognitively nurse on a metaphysical Klein Bottle. I do anyway.

We'll leave you with this orthoparadox to ponder: "This trinitarian 'we'... prepares at the same time the space of the human 'we'"; and Christ is the ultimate "'we' into which Love, namely the Holy Spirit, gathers us and which means simultaneously being bound to each other and being directed toward the common 'you' of the one Father."

Let Us Make Man in Our Image

Yesterday we alluded to Winnicott's crack that "there is no such thing as an infant," which is very much an analogue of the most ortho of paradoxes, that "there is no such thing as a God." That is, if man is going to be an image of the Creator(s), then we are going to have to have plurality somehow built into us.

Indeed, while there are many ways to fall, one of them is to presume a radical individuality, irrespective of whether or not one "believes" in God, for the more important point is that such a one is failing to "be" -- and three -- like God.

In Ratzinger's essay on The Notion of Person, he suggests that personhood was a Christian discovery or development, however you wish to characterize it.

It was Tertullian who, in the late second or early third century, nailed down the secret formula of "one being in three persons." For Ratzinger, this is when "the word 'person' entered intellectual history for the first time with its full weight." With this in mind, it is possible to understand such otherwise confusing data, such as God speaking in the plural, e.g., "Let us make man in our image and likeness," or "Adam has become like one of us."

And just lately I've been on a bit of a Sophia-Mary kick, and there is no gainsaying the fact that Ms. Wisdom seems to have been there from the start, even if she is created rather than -- like the second person -- begotten. I can't say that I recommend this book, because the author takes 400 pages to say what I just said in a sentence, but he compiles all of the material from the wisdom books of the OT that go to this, such as:

--Wisdom was first of all created things...

--The Lord created me the first of his works long ago, before all else was made.

--Then I was at his side each day, his darling and delight, playing in his presence continually...

So, wisdom is the first creation of the Creator. You might say that he creates creativity for us, which I think is alluded to in that second passage, i.e., playing in his presence continually. In this context, remember the words of our Unknown Friend, that it is all about transforming work into play. Remember too that mysterious word presence. We'll get back to that one, maybe later in the week.

In any event, with this radically new concept of person, we have the idea that personhood is "dialogical," only this is a three-person dialogue and thus a tria-logos. God is substance-in-relation, such that there is nothing beneath, behind, or above his relativity. Can you relate to God? Truly, you cannot not relate and still call yourself a person.

I remind you to keep the whole infancy thingy (discussed yesterday) in the back of your mind as we proceed.

As Ratzinger explains, "person must be understood as relation," whether we are talking about man or about God. With regard to the latter, "the three persons that exist in God are in their nature relations." They are "not substances that stand next to each other, but they are real existing relations and nothing besides."

To deeply appreciate this is to see, as it were, the negative of a photograph, except we're really talking about the positive of a pneumagraph. It's the same image, only seen insight-out from the proper perspective, or maybe with your x-ray specs. Really, it's how Blake can see God in a grain of sand and all that. If everything is relation, then cosmic alienation isn't just a drag, it's plain wrong.

Note that relation "is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation" -- which is why the Son cannot be created, because relation with the Son is what the Father is, so to speak (and vice versa).

This obviously brings to bear a novel way to think about oneself. It also goes to everything we have said about "idiom" in bygone posts, because that too goes to the relation(s) we are. You will never find yourself in yourself, rather, only in your relations, both to people and objects (the latter of which are always infused with personhood as well, however attenuated).

Truly, we are never alone, for the ultimate reality is person, and "person is the pure relativity of being turned toward the other."

However, note that it is not the person of Father, nor the person of the Holy Spirit, who incarnates in man. Rather, it is the person of the Son, whose personhood (even though it must be a fractal of the totality) is characterized by receptivity. The Son "receives" from the Father, and if it's good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for us.

Thus we read in John how Jesus says "The Son cannot do anything of himself." As Ratzinger explains, this is because "he does not place himself as a delimited substance next to the Father, but exists in total relativity toward him..."

This same ontological structure "is in turn transferred... to the disciples when Christ says, 'Without me you can do nothing.'" In this way, man "truly comes to himself and into the fullness of his own, because he enters into unity with the one to whom he is related."

You might say that this is how the flower of man's personhood turns toward the light and blooms, for man is "not a substance that closes itself in itself, but the phenomenon of complete relativity." We can only discover the reason for our being in relationship and in mutual giving, since each needs the other to be who he or she is. And Jesus is not the exception, but the rule. For spirit

"not only is," but in reaching "beyond itself, it comes to itself. In transcending itself it has itself; by being with the other it first becomes itself, it comes to itself. Expressed differently again: being with the other is its form of being with itself."

Which all goes to why the helpless infant and child must be prior to the man, not just chronologically but ontologically.

The Cosmic Baby and the Wholly (M)Other

Some of you may remember my take on psychogenesis -- i.e., the emergence, or better, presence, of mind -- found on pp. 109-123 of the bʘʘk.

It starts with a quote by John Bowlby, the father of modern attachment theory, which for me is one of the irreducible pillars of existence. In other words, if we want to have a Total View of Reality, we could no more exclude the interpersonal neurobiology of human attachment than we could physics or chemistry. It is that important, especially as elaborated by researchers such as Allan Schore.

My high altitude summary begins with a quote from Bowlby to the effect that "the least-studied phase of human development remains the phase during which a child is acquiring all that makes him most human. Here is a continent to conquer." This is followed by a comment from Tolstoy, who remarked that "it is but a step" from a five year old to an adult, "but from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance."

The basic idea is that the developmentally premature, neurologically incomplete, and therefore helpless, infant is truly the hinge of psychospiritual development, and without whom we could never have transcended Animal Planet, no matter how big and impressive our brains.

Since infancy is the narrow pain in the neck we must all pass through on the way to adulthood, it occurred to me (before writing the book) that mankind at large must have had to thread this same developmental needle. You might say that man needed to invent infancy in order to become man. So, who came first, the infant or the adult? This is similar -- probably identical -- to the question of what man "is" outside the social context, for man is always situated in a social context, without which he simply wouldn't be man.

One more quote, this one from Norbert Elias: "Over and over again, in the scientific myths of origin no less than the religious ones, [people] feel impelled to imagine: In the beginning was a single human being, who was an adult."

But to jump ahead -- and above -- a bit, there is a damn good reason that ultimate reality appears in history as an infant, because the infant is a quintessential analogue of this very principle -- so long as we bear in mind the orthoparadox that, to paraphrase D.W. Winnicott, there is no such thing as an infant.

Rather, "if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone." That is the key, because the mother-infant dyad is very much a kind of link between two interiors. Indeed, it is the link that forges and deepens those interiors. Conversely, most mental illness (AKA Failure to Launch) is rooted in disturbances in attachment.

I don't know of too many other people who write of the cosmic importance of babies, so imagine my surprise when I see Schindler making the same point. In the chapter we are discussing, The Sanctity of the Intellectual Life, he speaks of "the miracle of the other," i.e., "the gift of one to another, and thereby the rhythm of giving and receiving."

How does this delicate gift-giving rhythm get in here, i.e., into the cosmos? This may sound poetic or sentimental, but it is not; or maybe it is, but it is also literal: "This rhythm has its paradigm in the mother's smile." Or, jumping way ahead of ourselves, we could say that its highest expression comes in the form of Mary's benevolent Yes, an eternal Yes that is the birth of Christianity.

"Being in its highest 'natural' kind," writes Schindler, "takes its primary meaning from the mother-child relation," for "the child's first experience of being lies in its encounter with the mother's smile, received by the child in a manner that is not yet conscious" but "in time liberates the child to respond: to smile in return."

Thus -- and this is the critical point -- this mutual confirmation of being (whose outward sign is the smile) completes an extra-neurological circuit which in turn opens up the ever-expanding sensorium of our worldspace.

Think about the alternative, which is to say, maternal or environmental rejection of the being-ness of the infant (or just failure to recognize and confirm it, which will amount to the same thing from the infant's perspective). This only happens all the time, which is why a psychologist never runs out of potential patients.

Winnicott was quick to point out that nobody is perfect, such that all the baby really requires is "good enough mothering," for humans are a Resilient Bunch, and besides, we need pain and frustration, only in tolerable doses (just as the immune system needs germs and viruses to strengthen itself). But you might be surprised to learn how frequently this minimom standard fails to be met.

Schindler alludes to the metacosmic angle of this subject, describing how "This rhythm of gift and receptivity -- which is to say, this other-centered rhythm" which is "found at the level of human being, provides an index or analogue in terms of which to approach all levels of being."

That is a bold statement, i.e., that the human baby explains everything! But look at it from the other way around, and you can appreciate the fact that without the baby, we could explain nothing, for we could never have exited the closed loop of animal neurology.

The baby ushers in two related realities, relation and interiority, for human relation is interior-to-interior -- and not just with other humans. That is, even knowledge of so-called "objects" involves an abstraction of their interior, which is to say, their intelligibility.

So ultimately, our whole stance toward reality is interior-to-interior, which is why we have access to truth, beauty, and unity, none of which are empirical objects.

Now, if our task is to conform ourselves to the ultimate, the First and Last Word, then Jesus demonstrates how this is done, in that the second person of the trinity is "first" receptive, just as the baby is first receptive to the mother before "giving back" her love. So Christ "gives back" to the Father, but never "outgrows" this fundamental attitude of receptivity. He doesn't grow up to be Father, as if Sonship is a defect or partial thingy!

Likewise, in human terms, you could assert the orthoparadox that man never "outgrows" his childhood, for if he succeeds in doing so, he will fail to grow out of it. In other words, what sets humans apart from even the higher mammals is that we never transcend our neoteny, and therefore continue growing "forever," again, in imitation of the Trinity.

Here is how Ratzinger describes it in a fine paper called Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology:

"The content of Jesus' existence is 'being from someone toward someone,' the absolute openness of existence without any reservation of what is merely and properly one's own." And "As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you," but first you must willing to receive. Bottom line for today:

"Christ's doctrine is he himself, and he himself is not his own, because his 'I' exists entirely from the 'you."' And both are situated in the loving We. Thus, "The other through which the spirit comes to itself is finally that wholly other for which we use the stammering word 'God'.... The person is all the more itself the more it is with the wholly other, with God" (Ratzinger).

The Love of Science and the Science of Love

Next up in Schindler, The Sanctity of the Intellectual Life. Yes, sanctity, without which the intellectual life is not even worthless, but rather, perhaps the most harmful force in all of creation.

Yeah, you heard me, all of creation. For if human beings are the most precious things in all of creation -- which they are -- then nothing has destroyed more of us (not just physically, but mentally and spiritually) than intellectuals and the lies they propagate. So we're being quite literal here, not at all polemical.

A very quick google search leads me to this site called Necrometrics, estimating that in the 20th century, 203 million were killed as a result of war, genocide, and man-caused famine, 87 million alone from communism. By way of comparison, he calculates 8.5 million other murders worldwide in the same period.

And "3.5 million people were killed in 20th Century disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and volcanos," but even there, ideology has a lot to due with it, because a 7.0 earthquake in California may kill a handful, whereas thousands will die if it occurs in some craphole like Iran. It's the same with diseases. Relatively few people in first world countries die in epidemics, unless liberals get their way and everyone stops vaccinating their children.

It also says that exactly 34,075 people were killed by tigers in India between 1875 and 1912, but c'mon. I would file that under the general heading of Failure to Handle Your Bidness. Some things are just basic, like clearing out the snakes, bears, and malaria-bearing mosquitoes. (By the way, thanks again to liberal intellectuals, millions have died in Africa as a result of the ban on DDT.)

So, ideas have consequences, often deadly. At present, the most evil force in the world -- Islamism -- is an intellectual movement.

But let's get back to the main topic at hand, the sanctity of the intellect. What is it? Very simply, it is truth -- or, more precisely, reverence for truth. To paraphrase Schuon, nothing is more privileged than truth. If man is composed of intellect, sentiment, and will, then it is because we are proportioned to, and converge upon, truth, beauty, and goodness, respectively.

Just as "good" is what we are to do, truth is what we are to know, and beauty what we are to create. Each has its own special penumbra of sanctity. Each is loved for its own sake, not for any utilitarian reason. Like family and friendship, each is its own sufficient reason.

"Sanctity should provide the inner form of the intellectual life, in a way that affects both the methods and the content of the modern academic curriculum" (Schindler).

Just waiting for the laughter to die down.

Here is how Schuon defines sanctity: "it is the intuition of the spiritual nature of things; profound intuition which determines the entire soul, hence the entire being of man."

Now, truth is nothing if not spiritual. How's that? Because it is obviously immaterial, immateriality being one of the defining characteristics of Spirit. When I so much as see a tree as a tree, it is because -- recall the Helen Keller example last week -- the mind is able to perceive the abstract form in the particular substance. If we couldn't do this, we would be animals, precisely. Or, man is the animal with a rational soul, as Aristotle quipped. (But we are more than this as well.)

More Good Stuff from Schuon: "Metaphysical truth is in the first place discernment between the Real and the unreal or the less real." This implies that truth is hierarchically ordered from top to bottom (for it could never be vice versa, as per scientism, which literally elevates appearances to truth).

Truth is not what we make but what we discover. But this does not imply that truth is passive. To the contrary -- especially in the Christian view -- truth "offers itself" as a gift, so to speak, to the intellect. Reality is generous, self-giving, open -- but only to the mind that is similarly generous, self-giving, and open. As applied to man, these three go to the sanctity of the intellect.

A sanctified intellect is humble, open to the gift of truth, and even self-sacrificial, for clearly, in order to know any truth, we must "sacrifice" the interests and preferences of the ego.

Properly understood, science is most definitely a spiritual practice, something which virtually all scientists once knew. It clearly requires a kind of kenosis, or self-emptying in order to be properly filled by truth.

What scientism forgets is that it is rooted in this metaphysic of love. For what else do you call this mutual self-offering of truth and intellect? You could say, as Schindler does, that "all creation is dynamically ordered from and toward the love revealed by God in Jesus Christ." Yes, this is what you call real Christian science. Or just say science.

You know, the reason why the intellectual life is so rewarding is because it is this continuous gift of truth to intellect, right? It is a love affair. How can this be, if it is not built into the nature of things?

Oops. Just got called into work early. Let's abruptly conclude with this:

"[I]n Jesus Christ, God has assumed human nature, and, indeed, through human nature, in some sense all of nature. Nature from the beginning finds its integrity and freedom in obedience: in a relation of service to the Father, and thus in love.... Thus every created being in its depths exhibits an orientation and movement from God, and in this way... 'images' God" (Schindler).

God Is Dead, and So Is This Sentence

This next chapter in Schindler is called On the Meaning of the Death of God in the Academy, and it's a corker. He starts with the godlessfather of deconstruction, Derrida, who "criticizes Western thought in terms of what he calls its 'logocentrism,'" -- but, get this, uses words to do so. Doesn't that automatically call his method into question, i.e., using language to undermine the very basis of language?

No, not if the real point is destruction. It's like the Islamists who want 21st century military technology to bring us back to the 7th century, or progressives who want to limit our freedom in order to free us from freedom.

The joyously preposterous logocentrism of Raccoon tradition "presupposes that meaning is present to us, at least in principle." In premodern times this was consciously identified with the Christian logos and ultimately with the second person of the Trinity.

However, "with the secularization of the post-Enlightenment West, this link has been severed, but logocentrism nonetheless persists." In other words, some people haven't yet gotten the memo that God is dead, and don't realize that any possibility of meaning went out the door with him: "Simply stated, meaning and intelligibility presuppose God."

The eternal Logos pervades the universe -- it is immanent -- but is also the "transcendental signified," the "convergent object of reference to which all signs are somehow directed." Thanks to Logos Central, all truth speaks of, and is derived from, the One Truth -- or, in the words of de Lubac, All knowers know God implicitly in all that they know, whether they know it or not.

Derrida obviously knew what was at (the) stake here, so give him credit for that. For ultimately, "The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth" (in Schindler). It's just that there is no divinity, so the sign is barren, the crib (and even womb) is empty, and meaning has no descendents. There is nothing for the sign to point to except other signs, so the system is as inbred as the Royal Family.

However, even if this were true, it wouldn't solve the "problem" of meaning, and make it go away. In the past we have discussed how fractal geometry proves that a coastline -- say, the coastline around Hawaii, or Great Britain -- is actually "infinite," like a real-life Zeno's paradox. I suppose that the closest and most accurate measurement will reach all the way into the infinite nothing of dark matter or something. In other words, you fall out of the cosmos from the bottom end.

The point is that language is actually open at both ends. You can't just close off the top -- transcendence -- and pretend you're done with it. This, I think, explains the insane fertility of language, which was one of Joyce's main points in Finnegans Wake.

There are references to this throughout the text. I could spend the rest of the morning playing this game, but let's just say that When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit. That's been my credo for some 30 years, and it hasn't failed me yet.

So, "the age of the sign is essentially theological" (Derrida). But we are beyond the theological age, so "No longer do we naively appeal to a Divine Logos which undergirds the intelligibility in and of things and their linguistic expression" (Schindler).

Now, when Schindler says "we," he obviously means the tenured, for whom this is no doubt true despite the fact that truth is no longer possible for them. Whatever. Fuck you pay me.

Thus, "Derrida represents the return of [Nietzsche's] madman, insisting that the requisite time has now passed: it is time now for the death of God to be seen and heard in its full implications. Intelligibility -- identifiable meaning -- does not, and cannot, outlive God. Rather, following the death of God, we stray 'as through an infinite nothing'" (ibid.).

Have you gnosissed how the Fall can take so many diverse forms? For in the deconstructed world, "theos has been replaced by anthropos" (ibid.), which is just a fancy way of ssssaying Ye shall be as gods! It doesn't matter what you believe, so long as it amounts to nothing.

Note also how the Word, instead of becoming flesh -- and vice versa -- is displaced by the flesh. Well played, Beelzebub, well payed too.

Therefore you're a meaningless god, or a god without meaning, but hey, nobody's perfect. Plus you are in competition with a horde of similarly atomized and meaningless godlings, but seize enough power and you can control or vanquish them.

Knowledge itself is broken up into smaller and smaller parts, which reminds me of how the psychotic person is haunted by a persecutory world of projected psychic bits with no hope of synthesis and unity. Postmodernism is institutionalized psychosis, or cosmic lunacy. Not only is it a flight from transcendence, but a violent repression of it, which is how someone once defined fascism (violent opposition to transcendence, or something like that).

If you have followed the argument this far, you could say that, deep down, liberalism is not only shallow, but non-existent. It is the metaphysics of nothing, or applied nihilism. Which is why a Harry Reid, or Hillary Clinton, or Dick Durbin, are the way they are (and aren't).

What Does Meaninglessness Mean?

"Unless our language signifies something definite and intelligible," writes Schindler, "we can hardly consider with seriousness questions of truth." However, questions of truth are precisely what the tenured tell us are -- literally -- out of bounds, since we are bounded by language, in a closed system of signifyin' jive.

To make a long story short, once upon a time there was construction. This was followed by deconstruction, proving that man can destroy in a single generation what it took 13.7 billion years to build. Our task then is reconstruction, only perhaps on a firmer and more self-critical basis, so as to be better able to fend off the inevitable intellectual vermin who embody the catabolic force, the spirit of darkness.

These combative assouls will always be with us, and they do render a cosmic service, in that they will either kill us or make us stronger in the ability to vindicate Truth. As Peter says, don't sweat it, but "always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you," and as Paul says, be prepared to demolish "arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God."

First of all, someone needs to explain how meaning can arise in a meaningless cosmos. Sounds basic, but there are certain universal principles that man is entitled to know (for God doesn't leave us wholly in the dark), such as the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and never walking the pitcher.

Another one is that the greater cannot come from the lesser. Yes, we are aware of the fact that local conditions may temporarily overcome entropy, but this begs the question, since it doesn't explain how the information got into the local conditions to begin with. Rather, it still assumes what needs to be proved.

Besides, how would it be possible to prove meaninglessness? Isn't any proof proof of meaning? One might well say: I prove, therefore truth is.

Now, meaning can only exist if a thing refers to something beyond itself, whether we are talking about an individual person, all of history, or the entire cosmos. If the cosmos is ultimately a closed system, referring to, or situated in, nothing beyond itself, then any meaning we come up with is just a dream.

Thus, Christian eschatology embodies the principle that history does not achieve its own consummation within history. Simple as. Or, either it does or it doesn't. There can be no in between.

This then is one of the ground-floor principles that divides left and right: the left always exploits the primordial but misguided hope (a corollary of the Fall) that history can achieve its own consummation here and now -- that we can "fundamentally transform" things in such a way that we waltz straight back into our lost paradise. Then we will live as large as the little gods we are.

But history cannot consummate itself in time for the same reason man cannot do so. Rather, as Ratzinger writes, "such an expectation is irreconcilable with the perpetual openness and the perpetually peccable [i.e., capable of sinning] freedom of man." You might say that the leftist's dreams of terrestrial utopia are an insult to man's propensity to badness. The leftist forgets that man likes to rebel on principle, and that if he can't rebel against the light, then he'll even rebel against darkness.

In this regard, the leftist makes the inverse error of libertarians who seem to believe that the free market alone is able to foster or regulate morality. As Ratzinger observes, in utopian socialist planning, "the salvation of the world" won't come "from the moral dignity of man." Rather, it is supposed to arise "from mechanisms that can be planned," but which ignore "the values which support the world." The conservative liberal occupies the middle ground, in the belief that the free market does not create morality but must assume it.

Another cosmic principle is alluded to above, in that man is a perpetually open system. Another name for this open system is person. Now, how does such an infinitely open system -- open to the infinite -- arise in a supposedly closed cosmos? All other animals are enclosed within their nervous systems, so Kant had the right idea, just the wrong species. Persons by definition are radically open to what is outside and above them, i.e., to relationship and transcendence.

Bottom line: "eschatology, precisely because it is not a political goal, functions as guarantor of meaning." Conversely, deny it and meaning evaporates. The eschaton, in our view, is the "divine attractor" at the end of history, or which draws history in its wake. In a formulation we have deployed before, Jesus is end-made-middle, or transcendence-made-immanent, or consummation revealed now, or beyond-history made history, or O made ʘ, or Person(s) made person (and ultimately mankind), etc.

Ratzinger even favorably (I think) references Teilhard, who "defines Christ as the Omega point of evolution. Natural history and human history are for him stages of one and the same process," which I think goes to Paul's comment about how the whole darn creation groans for salvation. History "keeps approaching this goal without ever reaching it," which is again why applied utopia is a recipe for genocide. The latter "becomes a design for a prison instead of a search for true freedom."

The dysluxians of the left habitually conflate goal and gaol.

Freedomism and Slavery

For Schindler, our cultural death spiral -- or plunge into the culture of death -- has to do with an implicit and a priori acceptance of the substance of liberalism. Specifically, the idea of an "empty freedom" "serves precisely to create the illusion that we remain simply free to choose our own ontology."

People say you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. That's not true. Actually, you are entitled to your own facts as well, but not your own ontology. Facts are facts and reality is reality, but facts that aren't situated in the proper reality fail to be factual.

Freedom, of course, is of the highest value, on par with love, truth, unity, beauty, and virtue. But the liberal understanding of freedom coincides with an "anthropology which has always-already given that freedom its meaning."

However, thanks to the Cartesian Conspiracy, this freedom is "shaped by the liberal disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity" and thus "infected by the liberal dualism of will and intelligence, with its corresponding voluntaristic subjectivity and mechanistic objectivity."

In other words, freedom in this view has no intrinsic relation to truth or virtue, so freedom redounds to a grim Clintonian will to power, while our epistemological freedom is reduced to a kind of "perception is reality," so there is black truth, white truth, feminist truth, homosexual truth, etc. Which is no truth at all, being that truth converges on unity, not plurality. Truth and multiculturalism are antonymic.

We are all familiar with liberal bogies such as structural racism and white privilege, but far more problematic is structural sin, which goes to the existential reality of the fallenness into which we are born. Living as we must in "liberal structures," it is very difficult to avoid being naughty and still make a living.

For Schindler, "unless we recognize the ambiguity of present-day freedom at its very source, we risk colluding in the development of a culture that can easily... become the death of freedom." Note that this book was published in 1996, thirteen years before Obama took office and made it all rather obvious.

"Coincidentally," the Happy Acres Guy has a link to this interesting interview with a fellow who wrote a book called The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. He is saying pretty much the same thing we are, and yet, getting paid for it. From the interview:

"In your chapter A Brief History of Freedom, you propose what some might consider a damning interpretation of the anthropology of modern liberalism that suggests that the desire of 17th-century thinkers to free themselves from political authorities led to a rebellion against all external authority.

"The end result is not just a political, but an epistemic one: Reality ends up being self-constructed; we end up trapped in our heads. Your account starts with Descartes and his mind-body distinction, passes through Locke, and culminates in Kant [and drives Van nuts]. Does the modern political project we cherish -- liberal, democratic, rights-based, etc. -- and that those same thinkers developed necessitate the loss of genuine attention (and the consequent problems)?"

Crawford responds that his "critique of the anthropology we have inherited from early modern thought has a couple of dimensions. The first is sociological, simply noticing how autonomy-talk is pretty much the only idiom that is available to us for articulating our self-understanding, and how inadequate it is for capturing lived experience."

Exactly. Such "autonomy talk" is grounded in certain liberal assumptions about freedom that have nothing to do with the religious assumptions that gave freedom its original meaning and value.

He goes on to suggest that "Living in a culture saturated with vulgar freedomism, you may develop a jaundiced view of the whole project of liberation inaugurated by Descartes and Locke."

This parallels Schindler's observation that the implicit assumption of contemporary liberalism is that "truth and freedom are inversely related, in such a way that any clear claim of truth then becomes in principle a threat to (someone's) freedom."

This is how we end up with a liberal totolerantarianism that issues death threats to those who do not embrace the lie. It is very much as if liberals believe that truth enslaves instead of setting us free.

They are half-right about that, because for someone committed to the Lie, the truth will feel like an ominous prison: "liberalism's appeal to freedom, paradoxically, serves to enslave -- that is by virtue of its hidden dogma."

Conversely, the so-called dogma of Christianity wants desperately to liberate man into the metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, and anthropological reality of world-as-gift, or to situate our lives within the trinitarian dynamic of being for-being from-being with, or I-You-We, or just plain old Love.

You Complete Me!

The next chapter in Heart of the World is called Saving the Achievements of Liberalism. Funny how the left talks about the fatal contradictions of capitalism, but there is a genuinely fatal contradiction at the heart of left-liberalism.

We are seeing this inevitable auto-negation play out in real time, what with our authoritarian president and his lawless and/or clueless administration eroding our fundamental freedoms. But to attack a fundamental freedom is to equally attack a fundamental truth, the one being a necessary correlate of the other. And freedom + truth = responsibility.

Thus, we have reached the bizarre stage at which our federal government -- whose sufficient reason is to preserve and defend our God-given rights -- is presuming the right to force its citizens to pretend that a homosexual union is no different from a heterosexual twodom. As such, the state is reaching down to the very ground of being in order to pull our theomorphic nature out by the root.

I am reminded of people who complain that the Church won't "allow" female priests, when in reality, the Church has no right and no authority to do so. In short, unlike the left, it is not permitted to just make sh*t up. It certainly cannot be like Obama, one day having no authority to redefine marriage, the next day persecuting people who fail to do so.

You know the old crack, I don't believe in miracles, I only depend on them. Similarly, the left doesn't believe man is fallen, but rather, only relies on his being so. You could say that the fall is both a cause and consequence of leftism. This is what you call a bad infinite, in that it is at once a downward spiral and a mocking caricature of the Divine Spiral of Ascent.

Now, God is both the source and the vector of our freedom. You may have noticed that science cannot account for free will, for which reason it attempts to make it go away through various rationalizations, in such a way that it would make Gödel sick (or sicker). That is, if man is a closed system, then no truth of any kind can be known about man -- rather, it will all be self-referential and tautologous yada yada, AKA tenure.

As the philosopher of science Stanley Jaki wrote, "All arguments against free will are so many proofs of it," because "no determinist argues deterministically."

In a sense, free will "is subjectivity itself," that is, this mysterious subjective space we are privileged to inhabit. In the end, the reality of the human subject brings 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."

That is, what we call freedom "dangles," as it were, from the celestial to the terrestrial. True, it's Frank's world, but each of us holds a world by the string.

Interestingly, Jaki goes on to say that "the reality of free will" is "the only safe foundation of democracy. Political freedom without attention to free will invites rank irresponsibility, couched, of course, in convenient slogans about human fulfillment and economic prosperity." This is what I mean about the left being absolutely committed to man's fallenness.

The idea of freedom is a Christian one. Freedom is precious, but not for its own sake, since the latter redounds only to nihilism and absurdity.

Rather, "the conviction that man is born free" is an outgrowth "of the perspective that man was given freedom not in order to do anything he wants to but that he should be able to do what he is supposed to do" (ibid.).

It can hardly be overemphasized that our authoritarian state is forcing us to do what no one is supposed to do, under the guise of "liberation." If we are free to do everything, this is functionally equivalent to being free to believe anything. But we are only really free to believe truth. Believing lies hardly makes us more free, but rather, enslaves us. It's how Beelzebub rolls.

Note that freedom "cannot be reduced to anything else," and certainly to nothing merely quantitative. In this regard it reminds me of Planck's constant, which apparently defines how small something can be. In other words, there are irreducible units of tininess, tinier than which things cannot get. Likewise, man is "composed" of certain irreducible constants. These constants can be reduced, but only at the cost of eliminating man.

Not to change the focus -- or lack thereof -- of this post, but what are the constants that define man? One of the purposes of Jesus' mission is to show us these constants. Ultimately they revolve around the related concepts (or realities) of person and Trinity, and everything these imply.

Ratzinger has a profound essay on this in a book I just read, called Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology. It has too many explosions to assimilate in the time remaining, but he writes of how person is relation, and of how this relation is grounded in love.

But love is always a relation, so man is a relation of receiving and giving. Receiving and giving what? Oh, various gifts: Love. Truth. Beauty. Freedom. We do not generate these, but rather, as the Son is generated by the Father, we receive them -- not to hold onto or horde them, but rather, to pass the gifts along.

Thus, the very form of Jesus' existence is in "being from someone toward someone," in an "absolute openness of existence without any reservation of what is merely and properly one's own."

Yesterday a reader emailed me to let me know I sounded "needy and unappreciated" in my comment the other day about having so few comments the day before -- you know, like it's a bad thing. In my ingenuous and unsuspecting mind, that wasn't my point at all. Rather, I just wish more people wanted to receive what I have to give, in order to complete that cycle. True, so long as it reaches one person, that is sufficient. But still.

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

Not to sound all needy and stuff, but what I mean is you guys complete me, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

Bombs Away!

I'm still struggling, if that's the right word, to assimilate all the truth bombs tucked away inside Heart of the World, Center of the Church. Every time I clean up one implosion, another goes off.

What's especially weird is how a bomb in this book sets off one in another book, in a kind of nonlocal chain reaction. Then a bomb goes off in my dreamworld, followed by another on a TV program I was watching (The Journey Home on EWTN). Is someone trying to tell me something? And how do I put all of these explosions together? It's hard enough to deal with one.

The image comes to mind of young Helen Keller. By way of analogy, imagine we are to the divine world as she was to the human world in her sound-, sight-, and speechless (non)existence. Then she has that one "little" explosion, in which she realizes that all her disparate experiences of wetness may be organized under one abstract and transcendent heading: water!

That is the ultimate WTF -- AKA (?!) -- and it never stops. Compared to it, the Big Bang and biogenesis are just distant echoes or foreshadows of greater detonations to come.

Irrespective of whether the story is apocryphal, it nevertheless conveys a profound truth, maybe even the Greatest Truth Ever Told, since it is the very ground and basis of the possibility of truth: that this is that, and vice versa.

Or in other words, that our cosmos is a web of symbolic exchange, such that transcendent meaning everywhere courses through its nonlocal veins, arteries, and capillaries. It is only for us to tap into this interior process and participate in the flow of truth-love-beauty.

Yesterday someone mentioned Polanyi in a comment. In another cosmic coincidence, he is mentioned in a footnote of the very page I am now looking at. As it so happens, his last book -- and the final summation of his thought -- is called Meaning. I haven't looked at it in a number of years, but I don't really have to, since I long ago absorbed anything worth plagiarizing.

Speaking of explosions, the book looks like something exploded inside of it. There are notes scrawled everywhere, which is the pneuma-archeological evidence of so many Helen Keller moments, as Polanyi's ideas collided with my brain. Toots Mondello referred to these as cooncussions.

Examples: "The act of understanding is more important than what is understood." "Only the wise ones see beyond the limitations." "Wisdom has always been non-literal, i.e., 'not meaning what we said.'" "Whatever is undetermined on a lower level is conditioned by the next." "Fusion of incompatibles in the time before time. God as integrative AND limiting factor."

This makes me want to go back in time and buy some pot from this guy.

In the preface, Polanyi's collaborator, Harry Prosch, describes how "the modern mind has destroyed meaning," but how Polanyi's "work on the reformation of epistemology and the philosophy of science has prepared the way for a possible restoration of meaning through the development of the notion of personal knowledge" -- the latter a term of art for how the mind always "sees through" the data to the meaning toward which it points. (Speaking of Helen Keller, one of Polanyi's favorite examples was how the blind man, by unconsciously attending to the sensory input from stick to hand, is able to construct and "perceive" a three-dimensional space.)

Today we are deep into the wayback machine, because when I first read this book I was more or less an atheist and certainly anti-Christian. If I was ever going to come back from the outskirts of the cosmos, the only way would have been through someone like Polanyi, who follows a purely logical line of thought, only to arrive at the threshold of mystery and Mister O.

In the Journey Home episode mentioned above -- here it is, right on youtube -- the guest, a former atheist, has great praise for real atheists who genuinely Don't Know and won't rest until they find out, as opposed to the fashionable strident atheists who presume to know and won't shut up until they have forced the rest of us to accept their narrow, flat, and shallow reality.

The guest's experience exactly parallels mine, because his impersonal pursuit of truth lead him right back to the Person -- which must happen, given sufficient time and honesty. Either it happens or you just die stupid.

Back to Polanyi. Writing in the 1950s, he described precisely the state of contemporary liberalism: "freedom of thought destroyed itself when thought pursued to its ultimate conclusions a self-contradictory conception of its own freedom." This is why the more liberalism, the less freedom of thought, the quintessential case being acadummia.

Imagine a place set aside and devoted to the unfettered pursuit of truth, becoming the one place where this is forbidden. What comes after irony? But this is the power of the Adversary: to transform something into its opposite with no effort at all.

To be sure, Polanyi was confused about some things. After all, he wasn't really a "philosopher" per se, rather, just a very curious scientist who refused to mind his own business and stay within the confines of his own department. But we forgive him his blind spots for the light he shed on so much tenured darkness. Like everything else, he must be "raised up" into a higher, total truth.

About this "total truth." In order to reach it, one must follow the circuitous and soph-bewildering Raccoon path, and be a rank multi-undisciplinarian. In order to know a lot about the One Thing, you need to know a little about every thing, and vice versa.

This goes directly against the Conspiracy, which, as Schindler describes it, "presupposes an extrinsic or external relation among the contents of the disciplines." Thus, physics, for example, has nothing to do with anthropology, which has even less to do with theology.

Tertullian famously asked "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Quite a lot, actually, so long as we put things in their proper order and don't try to trump God with our manmode philosophy.

Schindler points out that this division of disciplines "is already the expression of a mechanistic worldview, whose hallmark is [an] 'atomism' which assumes unrelated (or primitively externally related) parts." Therefore, no unifying worldview is possible, because you have uncritically denied it at the outset. Once again the Adversary doesn't even have to get up off the couch to accomplish this.

But guess what? Not even atoms behave like this, let alone minds! In other words, a metaphysic of logical atomism may in fact be ruled out from the get go.

I'm out of time, so I'll just conclude with a comment by Schindler that goes to how our task is to take the inverted cosmos bequeathed to us by liberal vulgarians and put it back on its feet: "physics and biology therefore, to be pursued intelligently ('critically'), must... remain intrinsically open to explanation on levels above them, indeed, to explanation all the way to the level of ultimacy (metaphysics, theology)."

Amen for a child's job. Because someone's gotta do it.

We Don't Need Your Stinking Creativity!

Every once in awhile I do find myself saying to myself: why only eight comments? That was solid metaphysical entertainment! Two nights ago I had a dream that goes to this question of what I'm doing here. Perhaps we'll be able to weave it into today's sophering.

Back to the topic at hand, which is the convertibility of love and logos. In a footnote that could have been clearer, Schindler adverts to this "convertibility of order and love in Jesus Christ," which is in turn "revelatory of the circumincession of order and love in the Trinity..."

Now, circumincession is synonymous with perichoresis, which you might say is the interior dance of the three Persons; but the whole thing is fractal, in that the same threeness is present in each one, so it must look like... I don't know, like a dancing trinitarian fractal:

If I understand him correctly, Schindler is saying that this circumincession of love and order in the Trinity is the "primary analogue" for what we experience as beauty herebelow. To reduce it to a mathematical equation, we might say that personal order (i.e., the ordered subject) + divine love = beauty.

But that's all Schindler says about it, so we're left wanting a little more.

Help us out, Schuon!

"Art is the quest for -- and the revelation of -- the center, within us as well as around us."

We might say that it is an exteriorization of an order that transcends us, thus a kind of immanent ordering of spirit-love. In this way we imitate the creativity of the Creator -- in whom, I might add, the two cannot be separated. In other words, even more than "doing" creation, the Creator is creation. Or, he is what he does, and vice versa.

Schuon even says so in that peculiar way of his: "The essential function of sacred art is to transfer Substance, which is both one and inexhaustible, into the world of accident and to bring the accidental consciousness back to Substance.

"One could say also that sacred art transposes Being to the world of existence, of action or of becoming, or that it transposes in a certain way the Infinite to the world of the finite, or Essence to the world of forms; it thereby suggests a continuity proceeding from the one to the other, a way starting from appearance or accident and opening onto Substance or its celestial reverberations."

What this suggests is that "the man" Jesus is a kind of divine art, such that he is -- or in him is -- a continuous "transfer" of the divine beauty into our terrestrial order (and "personal order," quintessentially), for the purpose of raising that order into the divine beauty.

Yesterday we spoke of the divine attraction, of how "God is not force but attraction (to beauty and truth), persuasion, surrender-in-freedom. Or one might say that love is his force."

Therefore, we are (at least) equally attracted to the beauty as to the truth of Christ, and both paths are equally valid. Apparently this has become a controversial idea as a result of the iconoclastic tendencies of the protestant movement, but truth without beauty is... letter without spirit, light without warmth, absolute without infinite, particle without wave, etc.

So, "Art has a function that is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a 'sympathetic magic'; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our return to the 'kingdom of God that is within you'" (Schuon).

Right? In the book, I symbolize this sympathetic magic with the squiggly equal sign (≈). It can only take place between persons -- which doesn't mean that it cannot take place between you and an "inanimate" object.

What it means is that certain so-called inanimate objects -- works of genuine art -- have this effect on us because they communicate person, specifically, the Divine Person. We could say the same of the supernatural beauties of nature. Otherwise, how did they get here? These beauties are interior-to-interior communication, and ultimately person(s)-to-person(s).

Schuon kind of agrees that art is "a means of expression" of our personality, "a movement from ourselves to ourselves, or from the immanent Self to transcendent Being" and back again. The exteriorized work of art is like the contrail, or tracks left behind and below from this encounter(ing).

Which goes to why modern art is generally so deficient, because it fails to begin in reception, but rather, is mired in a promethean creativity that presumes to cut itself off from the very source of beauty. How stupid is that? Thus, it is a repetition of the Fall, only transposed to the key of art.

Again, Schuon kind of agrees, even though I'm thinking this through independently: "The modern conception of art is false insofar as it puts creative imagination – or even simply the impulse to create -- in the place of... an objective and spiritual" encounter.

In other words, we don't need your stinking creativity if it merely emerges from the abyss of your own festering sinkhole of inappropriate self-regard. For "profane art," as Schuon observes, "exists only for man and by that very fact betrays him." "Art for art's sake" is cosmic treason.

In reality, "beauty stems from the Divine Love, this Love being the will to deploy itself and to give itself, to realize itself in 'another'; thus it is that 'God created the world by love'" (Schuon).

And yes, cartesian dualism undermines all of the above, and leads directly to the grotesquely ugly world of contemporary liberalism. Schindler explains how:

"Liberalism's intended priority of method over content and its purely formal procedures entail a mechanizing of order and a 'subjectivizing' of love, thus involving us in the end in nothing less than an obstruction to holiness" and exclusion from the eternal perichoresis of order and love.

But -- and this is the good news -- nothing obligates us to participate in this cosmic inversion. At least so long as we can evade the Cake Nazis.

I Think Therefore I Am, or Maybe I'm Just a Little Oxygen Deprived

Now, when we say that the ultimate order of the cosmos is Love, the irony is that the modern materialist is the one who is anthropomorphizing things, not us. Rather, we are... theomorphizing in an utterly impersonal way. It just turns out that doing so results in a personalization of reality.

In other words, just because we say the world is personal, it doesn't necessarily mean that we have a personal interest in it being so, any more than we have a personal stake in two plus two equaling four. It's just the way it is, and we assume that it's good to conform ourselves to the way things are, i.e., for mind and reality to be attuned.

Was that clear?

No?

Okay, let's try to explain. As we know, all of western civilization went off the rails one cold night in Bavaria, when Descartes shut himself inside with the oven turned up to 11, and had several hypoxia-induced visions as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning -- similar to the first time Paul McCartney took LSD and concluded that THERE ARE SEVEN LEVELS!

In Descartes' case, he concluded that THERE ARE TWO LEVELS! Or rather, that there is one level divided by two: I and AM, matter and mind, object and subject.

This resulted in the infamous "mind-matter problem," in that people immediately forgot that the problem was only a chronic residual of the original carbon monoxide poisoning. It is very much like the man who keeps smashing his head against the wall while complaining of a headache. In other words, the dualists are suffering from a problem of their own making: they are laboring under a persistent metaphysical or ontological neurosis.

Oddly enough, I am not the only one who thinks this way. For example, Schindler alludes to "the anthropocentric Cartesian horizon that has largely prevailed since the seventeenth century, which makes subjectivity coextensive with human subjectivity" (emphasis mine).

Well, who says? That's right: some giddy mathematical genius with too much time and too little oxygen. If that's our standard, then let's filter carbon monoxide into every math department and see what they come up with, instead of just filtering it into humanities departments.

Let's go back to step one, before the bifurcation of reality. "What I have in mind," writes Schindler, is "a subjectivity that takes its first meaning in terms of a properly metaphysical interiority."

In other words, rather than splitting the world into interior and exterior, why don't we begin with the way things actually are, and recognize that interior and exterior are entangled in an irreducible way?

As alluded to in yesterday's post, this was one of Whitehead's central conclusions (although realization is probably a better word). As Harthsorne describes, Whitehead recognizes not only that "the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere" (emphasis mine), but that this somewhere "can only be in a primordial mind."

Whitehead's "doctrine is that experience is the principle of all being" and "ground of order." This is why everything doesn't happen at once, or why there isn't pure chaos or entropy: his point is that "a multitude of agents could not select a common world and must indeed simply nullify one another's efforts, unless some common limitation or bias pervades their acts."

Thus, among other conveniences, God is what you might call limitation-on-probablility; or in other words, he provides the boundary conditions through which he exerts a top-down influence on creation. So we got that going for us.

All splitting aside, "only a being with universal influence" could exert such order, even while maintaining freedom -- the freedom of potential (which are two sides of the same reality).

Therefore, God must be a person. After all, he's certainly personal. And "personality, as any psychologist knows, is a sort of cluster of habits and purposes and ideas," with the caveat that analogies to God must be balanced by the lack thereof. Or in other words, you might say that we are like God, but God is not like us. So to speak, yada yada.

But in any event, "God's influence is supreme because he is the supreme actuality, supremely beautiful and attractive." And "there is no 'power' anywhere, on earth or in heaven, except the direct and indirect workings of [divine] attractiveness."

In other words, God is not force, but attraction (to beauty and truth), persuasion, surrender-in-freedom. Or one might say that love is his force. May it be with you. And take your head out of that damn oven.

You Are Ordered to Love!

This is the sort of idea that I would have once considered hopelessly sappy -- maybe not even sappy -- but now believe to be not only truth, but the Truth of truth. "Thus my fundamental claim" -- hey, mine too! -- "is that, in our understanding of the basic structure of the cosmos, logos and love are convertible" (Schindler).

Thus, way before it is a human emotion or attitude, it is "the meaning or order basic to the universe, even as the meaning or order basic to the universe is now understood always to include love." Or as God said to creation, "I order you to love!"

First, of all, no, I can't sell you any pot. Second, what does this even mean?

It means that the universe cannot be subjected to that naughty cartesian dualism without doing it great harm. You could even say that Descartes ushers in a metaphysics of hate. Or at least a lot of hateful ideologies eventually spring forth from that initial bifurcation of reality -- for example, Marxism, scientism, reductionistic Darwinism, etc. I don't mean this in a polemical way, but rather, quite literally. I'm just sayin'.

Explain.

Okay, assuming the convertibility of Love and Logos, "it follows that the basic order of the universe -- hence the primitive meaning of object(-ivity) and subject(-ivity) -- is not mechanistic; and that love -- hence subject(-ivity) -- in its primitive meaning is not arbitrary" (ibid.).

There are so many new age books on how cartesian dualism is all wrong blah blah blah that it has become an empty cliché. And you hear so much from those divine salesmen about how God-is-luv-yada-yada-now-give-me-money that it too can become a platitude.

But put the cliché and the platitude together, and now you've got something: "In short, the Christian understanding of creatures as made in the image of Jesus Christ entails a convertibility of 'logic' (logos) and love," and therefore -- and this is the key to God's whole thingdom -- "a convertibility of object(-ivity) and subject(-ivity)."

In other words, no-thing is merely a thing, if by thing you mean something radically separate from the primordial love of the Divine Subject.

I came to this coonclusion long ago, at least insofar as the Subject is concerned. Six years ago I wrote a post about it, called Getting Intimate with Sophia. Let's see if it contains any memoirs or premumblings of this future post we're working on right now.

Not surprisingly, the old post is discussing Balthasar, who seems to be Schindler's main influence too. There is a quote from von B. to the effect that "The intimate character of being, which reaches its completed end in the conscious spirit, has its preliminary stages in unconscious nature. There is no being that does not enjoy an interiority, however liminal and rudimentary it may be."

Realizing this latter was a major (?!) WTF moment for me. It even says so: "I was idly contemplating something Whitehead had said along similar lines, when the Gagdad coconut 'snapped' in such a way that the inside was now out, and the outside in. I suppose you could say that it was like the sudden solution to a koan, which is not an intellectual affair, but more of a breakthrough into the ground of being."

And "once you have secured this realization, then so many other pieces of the puzzle naturally fall into place. In other words, once one understands that interiority is not somehow magically confined to animal brains in such a way that it defies all explanation, then the most intractable problems of philosophy more or less vanish. We see that these 'problems' were just the inevitable residue of our defective mode of knowing" -- you know, the cartesian mode.

You could say that the cartesian split is literally a kind of brainwash, to the point of brain sterilization: like chemotherapy, it kills everything living, both the good and bad, the ugly and the beautiful. It makes sense of one narrow dimension while making nonsense of a much larger one. It is precisely what renders the infertile eggheads infertile and their yolks so laughable.

In the old post there's even a riff on how the end is the beginning and all that, just as we -- or Balthasar -- were riffing on about yesterday. Coincidence? I don't think so.

HvB: "Here every ending becomes a beginning...." Me: "O me ga!" is "the shocking realization of the end (omega), the telos, which tells us all about the beginning [the Bigending referred to yesterday and forever]. Thus, we can 'explain everything,' but only in the eternal now, where there is no longer a radical disjunction between the 'it' and the 'I,' or subject and object (no 'it'). It's the same place, but now we know it in an entirely different, participatory manner."

And this "participatory manner" is none other than Love. "'It is accomplished' by the One who has already rejoined heaven and earth, inside and outside, man and God. And he's always happy to extend a little nonlocal assistance to get it accompliced" (note the same stupid pun with which we ended last Friday's post. The prophecy has been foolfilled!).

"With regard to scientific law, one could never say 'it is accomplished,' since the laws apply only to a finite realm that has already been unnaturally split into rigid categories of subject and object." Or, conversely, one could say that it is too facilely accomplished, as I was telling my friend Victor yesterday. Oddly enough, we were speaking in a place called Paradise Cove, and it was Easter Sunday, and a Victor was present... In any event, we agreed that the world described by science is infinitely smaller than the one described by theology. The more you know about latter, the bigger it gets. Exponentially.

Which is also why "at their margins, both science in general and the scientific method in particular generate metaphysical absurdities that can never be resolved within the realm of science, since they assume up front what they try to eliminate at the back. This is strictly impossible, but don't tell the tenured. It would be cruel to deprive a primitive people of their comforting myths" (Bob).

In other words, you might say that the cartesian split takes out a huge epistemological loan on future discoveries which can never happen. Or, it is like setting off in search of the back of one's head, or trying to kiss one's aseity. It encloses one in an absurcular process from which one can never escape, or his name isn't Gödel.

In fact, Gödel would agree that the realm of nature "must always remain richer than any cognition of it," such that "the truth of the lowest level of being contains a richness that so utterly eludes exhaustive investigation that it can continue to engage inquirers until the end of time..." Ouch, that's a whole umlautta love.

To sum up, it seems possible that John Lennon was right all along, and that these lyrics aren't quite as trite as they sound:

In the Bigending

"No one is witness to the birth of a world. No one knows how the night of that Saturday's hell was transformed into the light of the Easter dawn. Asleep it was that we were all carried on wings over the abyss, and asleep did we receive the grace of Easter....

"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 have met is my birthday in eternity, and no time shall ever be this Now. Here is where the starting point has been set. Here is creation and a new beginning....

"Through my death this has been spared you, and no one will ever experience what it really means to die: This was my victory. While I was falling and did nothing but fall, the New World was emerging....

"My descent, my vertiginous collapse, my going under (under myself) into everything that was foreign and contrary to God -- down to the underworld: this was the ascent of this world into me, into God. My victory....

"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....

"But just as the earth rounds itself off into a ball, so, too, do the veins make a return to the Heart and love goes out and comes back eternally. Slowly you will master the rhythm.... the departure and the return are one and the same. Nothing any longer exists outside of this one and only flowing life....

"And so in the end you remain alone, all in you. You are one with yourself, and without losing yourself you pour yourself out into the many. By remaining in the multiplicity of the members, you bring them all home into the unity of the Body..."

(Hans urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World)