How Wide is Your Spiritual Aperture and What is it Like to be Dead?

It seems to me that the forthcoming post is radically undetermined, and that if I don't write it, it will never be written. It's not as if it will write itself.

Then again, I suppose it will write itself, but not without my participation. It's more like I'll organize what is presented to me, or something.

Yes, but what do you mean by "it"? Is "it" there all at once -- in which case you just transcribe it -- or does it appear serially, partly conditioned by what you've already written?

Yes, it has to be that way, otherwise it would make no sense. There would be no continuity, as each new word would be disconnected from what has just come. So each word has to be connected to the past, and yet, must also converge upon a future which is not yet known.

How do we pull this off? What is the nature of language such that this is even possible?

It seems to me that this nondoodling process must be a microcosm of our-moment-to-moment existence, which is indeed always conditioned by the past and transforming into the future, and yet, only experienceable in this infinitesimal, immeasurable moment of choice, of freedom, in which we can, as it were, tilt the past toward one of many possible futures.

We cannot experience the past, which is gone, nor the future, which isn't yet here, only this momentary moment, which is also never here, since it has already vanished by the time we even notice it.

My wife has seriously taken to her new hobby of photography, and one might think that photography is the quintessential art form for capturing "moments."

For example, she'll take a rapid fire burst of photos of the boy in action in a baseball game, but this captures images so fleeting that they weren't actually experienced -- any more than we experience things at the quantum level, even though they are obviously occurring.

The photo slices up the temporal continuum in such a way that it reminds me of what we said the other day about the length of a coastline being infinite. Analogously, you could say that the faster the lens, the the slower the time. If I understand the concept.

Morson describes a similar literary device used by Dostoyevsky in The Idiot, something he calls "vortex time." Have you ever been in a temporal vortex? When you are, it is as if you are in the gravitational field of a dreadful attractor. As you are drawn closer to it, freedom narrows until there is no choice left except to submit to the attractor. One imagines that death must be like this, even the essence of it. (There are also blissful attractors, but that is the subject of a slightly different post.)

In fact, The Idiot contains "repeated descriptions of the last moments of a person condemned to death." Now, we are all condemned to death, but most of us put off thinking about it until it is visible or palpable.

It is as if we have been dropped from the top of a building. No one knows how tall the building is or was until he hits the ground. The condemned man is in a somewhat unique position, since he has full conscious awareness of exactly how tall his building is: tall enough to reach the SPLAT.

Thus, Dostoyevsky "dwells upon the speeding up of time experienced by the prisoner as executions nears" (ibid).

This is all a bit abstract and theoretical, isn't it Bob? Er, no. In 1849 Dostyevsky was arrested and condemned to death, "but at the last moment a note from Tsar Nicholas I was delivered to the scene of the firing squad, commuting the sentence to four years' hard labour in Siberia."

So the man knows of what he speaks. On the way to the execution "it seems to the prisoner as if he has plenty of time. He imagines that his last half hour has room for an immense number of sensations and thoughts, for his mind now works at an extraordinary rate in order to concentrate the energy of a lifetime into those last moments" (Morson).

So the aperture is wide open, allowing a lifetime of light -- even the dimmest -- to be perceived. Remember: the faster the aperture, the slower the time: "As the time remaining diminishes, the mind speeds up still more, so that ten minutes, and then five, and then one, and then a fraction of one, contain the energy of a lifetime" (ibid).

Like Zeno's paradox, it is as if the distance to the street below is divided and subdivided endlessly: "The agony of knowing that the absolute end is near... increases geometrically, and with ever-increasing rapidity it transforms all thoughts, all stray impressions... into reminders of the imminent horror."

The Attractor is now in full view: "There is one point that can never be forgotten, and one can't faint, and everything moves and turns about it, about that point" (Dostoyevsky). Then, as the prisoner's head is right on the chopping block, "parts of a second shrink, [and] the mind speeds up virtually to infinity" (Morson).

"[T]ime itself has been deformed, intensified, sped up more and more as it is sucked into the vortex. The lifetime's worth of agony that has been concentrated into a tenth and then a hundredth of a second must now be lived through a hundred times if that severed head can remain aware for an entire second" (ibid).

Now, the first thing I think about is Christ's Passion, and how his execution is elevated to nothing less than the cosmic vortex around which all of creation is oriented and into which it is drawn -- as if all of human history is pulled into that vast and inconceivable white hole.

Then I think of Revelation, for example, "Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, Amen."

Then, oddly enough, I think of the Cosmobliteration section of the book, in which I try to demonstrate what happens to language as we approach the singularity. Not saying I succeeded, since I'm still alive.

Lost my aperture. Just apophatic nonentity. Cut me down to sighs. Too old, older than Abraham, too young, young as a babe's I AM...

Closing Time in the West

People are always trying to close time. It seems to me that a singular cosmic achievement of man was to enter time, but as soon as he did so, he began searching for ways out.

This is understandable. Indeed, I've plotted a graph into the next 100 years, and if present trends continue, it looks like we'll all be dead by then. Unless we can somehow arrest time.

What is Marxism but a quite literal attempt to close down time? For Marx, "history" is just the side effect of ironclad laws, and the sooner it ends, the better.

One reason the Marxist has no qualms about stealing your slack is that you don't actually have any slack to begin with -- similar to how you didn't know how substandard your health insurance was until Obama took it away.

Morson writes of the fall of the Soviet Union, a nation we might think of as a kind of parentheses within TI(ussr)ME.

In other words, the Soviet Union came into being with the idea that the end of history -- or the beginning of the end -- had been reached. But then, in the blink of an eye, it was all over, and history came crashing back in: "Statues of the man [Lenin] who established the final system," which was "destined to survive forever, were overthrown in a kind of ritual return to 'history'" (Morson).

Of course, history had been taking place all along, just as Michael Jackson was still aging despite the decades-long attempt to freeze his development at age 12.

So, who goofed? Who caused this obnoxious return of history? Ironically, one thing you can't have in Marxism is "responsibility," since responsibility is a consequence of freedom. To affirm that consciousness and behavior are determined by class is to exonerate one of all responsibility. And yet, the Moscow Times reports that Marxist and leftist lawmakers in Russia want to investigate Mikhail Gorbachev "for his role in the 1991 collapse of the USSR."

Indeed, what is a Marxist "lawmaker" anyway? If everything is determined by the laws of scientific materialism, isn't this analogous to investigating the head of the biology department because some animals are so damn ugly?

Ho! "We are still reaping the consequences of the events of 1991.... People in Kiev are dying and will continue to die at the fault of those who many years ago at the Kremlin made a decision to break up the country."

If this is true, then Marxism is untrue. But there is no cognitive dissonance, any more than an American liberal has cognitive dissonance in believing increased energy costs will reduce demand while increasing the minimum wage won't reduce the demand for labor.

Ironically, the Clinton years were called a "holiday from history," when they were quite the opposite. Rather, the fall of the USSR "was a kind of metahistorical act, in this case asserting the openness of time" (Morson) and of history -- just as the murder of the Tsar had been a kind of blood sacrifice to the god Chronos, initiating a system of sacrifice for keeping history at bay.

Mmmm, bourgeois long pig:

So, with the implosion of the USSR, "for good or ill, the future was no longer guaranteed. After decades of certainty, the possibility of possibility was reborn..."

However, the Marxist parasite is embedded deep in the human soul. It is a retrovirus, always waiting for favorable conditions to attack the host. We will never be rid of it, because it is an expression of human nature -- that part of our nature with which it is our task to do battle, this battle being the primary drama of life.

Once one forecloses vertical space -- as do all secular fundamentalists, by definition -- then this battle is over. You might say that eliminating the vertical is to individual development what Marxism is to history. In short order, maturity becomes history, a thing of the past, gone with the tradition that nurtured it.

Our Ten Commandments provide a summary of how we are supposed to carry on the battle with our(lower)selves, especially the latter five that govern human-to-humam relations; in short, honor tradition, and don't lie, steal, envy, and fornicate. Liberalism turns each of these on its head and celebrates the mirror image.

Obamacare, for example -- probably the most steaming pile of liberal legexcretion ever -- is built on a foundation of envy, theft, and the obliteration of tradition, and at this very moment the Supreme Court is deciding whether businesses can be compelled by the state to subsidize sexual license. And if the whole catastrophe works as it is supposed to, then the death panels are coming, AKA rationing of services to eliminate the unworthy.

So the progressive succeeds in stunting history and therefore progress. For the ones who have been waiting for themselves, the wait is over, and closing time -- and therefore freedom -- may proceed apace for the rest of us.

In the Beginning, Now & Forever, Worlds without End

This is the best I could do under the oppressive workumstances. Straight off the top of my head in a very short span of time. Consider it a brief pause or lateral sidetrip in our ongoing discussion...

It all comes down to time, doesn't it? If we could just figure out that one enigma, then the rest might fall like dominoes.

You can understand why no real progress has been made on the subject since Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas. If you want to get a sense of how little we really know about time, just ask a childlike question such as, is the past real? Where is it then? Does the present emerge from the past or does it come into being from the future? Either way, how can choice exist?

When we arrive at a fruitless paradox, it's probably a sign that we're going about things the wrong way. It's not that the questions are wrong, but that our whole paradigm is off. We need to examine our assumptions at the very foundation of things.

Existence "takes place" in space and time. Or, one could say that we are "contained" in these two. But being contained in space is very different from being contained in time. Schuon writes that space is "static and conserving" while time is "dynamic and transforming."

That's helpful, for it suggests that classical liberal conservatism is woven into the very fabric of existence, i.e., change within conservation.

Must you politicize everything, God?!

YES and NO.

We are subjectively at the center of space, otherwise we could never conceive it. Objectively -- or abstractly -- we can see that space has the three dimensions of height, width, and depth, but subjectively (or concretely) we experience things from our center to the periphery, the latter extending up and down, forward and back, left and right (paraphrasing Schuon).

Likewise, time has subjective and objective modes. Concretely, time is "the changing of phenomena," whereas abstractly it is simply the "duration" or measurement of the change.

Now, just as abstract space has the three dimensions of height, width, and depth, abstract time has the three dimensions of past, present, and future.

Is time nested in another kind of time -- divine time, say? Think of how the rotation of the earth measures our days. But this takes place in the more expansive time it takes for the earth to circle the sun. And the sun too orbits the center of the Milky Way, one cosmic year taking around 225-250 million years, give or take.

But that's objective time. What about subjective time? Does our time have something analogous to the cycles within cycles? Yes, in the obvious sense that we celebrate birthdays, or the sabbath, or the new year, or bar mitzvahs, or anniversaries, or beer o'clock, etc. Thus, there is the "ordinary time" of mere duration, nested in more concrete markers of slackramental time.

Yes, but are there only these manmode markers, or are there objective, which is to say, God-given ones?

Hmm. Schuon suggests that time is not just abstract duration, but that it has four phases. We may think that our experience of the seasons gives rise to the idea of temporal phases, but Schuon says it is the other way 'round, so that time unfolds as spring, summer, fall, and winter; or morning, day, evening, and night; or childhood, youth, maturity, and old age; etc.

Is it just me, or is it getting a little chilly in here?

What about all of history? This is where I would tremulously disagree with Schuon, for he regards it as essentially cyclical, whereas I can't help seeing it as spiroidal.

In short, we both believe time necessarily has an "origin" or source. But Schuon believes that history is essentially a departure from the source, and therefore a privative and degenerative phenomenon. However, the whole idea of Resurrection seems to me like the hope of an eternal spring coiled inside that last cold winter we endark upon

God's Troubles with the Cosmic Rollout

As I mentioned in a comment the other day, this book on the nature of time, Narrative and Freedom, is quite provocative, so much so that it's provoking more ideas than I can assimilate. It's like each idea is a seed for its own tree. Although not difficult, it is thick, or rich, or dense. Just the kind of book I like.

That is, most books -- even from the nontenured -- contain one or two ideas swathed in reams of self-indulgent verbiage. Cognitively speaking, such books are totally saturated and therefore dead.

The good book is the opposite: it is alive with ideas that are efficiently expressed with a minimum of fuss and pretension. Instead of being self-important, the writing is soph-important, in service to the idea that is its attractor and leading edge. Or in other words, it is transparent, in Polanyi's from-->to sense.

I suppose the problem is that the postmodern rabble doesn't understand that ideas are real, and instead pretends that words are just about other words.

Therefore, not only are we sealed into a closed cosmos (as per scientistic dogma) with no possibility of escape or inscape, but we are equally -- and for the same reason -- enclosed in language. Because transcendence is a priori impossible, throwing out words is no more (but no less) effective than tossing bricks in the sky.

Which all goes to the central theme of this book, which is: is the universe closed, or open? There are two main ways to live as a shut-in within a closed universe, one religious, the other scientistic.

As we've been discussing in recent weeks, if predestination is the case, then this is another way of saying that time is closed. From our standpoint in the now, it certainly looks as if there are any number of potential paths into the future, each path in turn branching off into additional choices.

In other words, from where we stand phenomenologically, the future looks like a tree, with its trunk planted in the now, and its branches and leaves representing possible futures. But then, a new tree extends forward out of each branch and leaf. We can never embrace or embody the tree, which is always up ahead. (One of the difficulties of writing history is appreciating the unknown future -- the tree -- from the perspective of the past; or in other words, we know the future but they don't.)

But now that I'm thinking about this for the first time, it looks to me as if the tree very much has a fractal structure. Which is to say, it has similarity across scale. Examine any point in time, and we see the self-similar tree structure. The question is, is the tree only similar in form, or also similar in content?

It seems to me that both must be true, or the cosmos would degenerate into chaos. This is another way of saying that there exist attractors within the structure of the tree, i.e., forms, archetypes, ideas, what have you.

To cite one obvious example, we are told that "random evolution" has "discovered" the eye on many separate occasions. Or in other words, it is as if so-called "independent" evolutionary branches are guided by the strange attractor of the eye-idea.

This would also apply to personal development. For the existentialist, in each now we are radically free; there is no past that compels us, nor any future that limits us.

But of course, this is not what it feels like, at least in the absence of chemical fortification. Rather, we are always shaped by our past and constrained by both virtues and mind parasites. Both are attractors in vertical space, the former located above and ahead, the latter behind and below. No one is radically free, least of all Jean Paul Sartre!

(Interestingly, a perversion subjectively feels "free" to the pervert; or the pervert feels existentially liberated while engaging in the perversion, which is why movements that celebrate various perversions -- whether sexual, political, or genderoid -- usually have the word "liberation" in their self-designation, just as one can be sure that a country with the word "Democratic" in its name is a tyranny.)

Anyway, the other way to enclose oneself in time is via scientism, but we've debunked that bunk so many times that I don't want to rub it in. Not sporting.

Among the Big Ideas -- or let's say Big Questions -- that have struck me while reading this book is, How far to take this view? I am all for taking it all the way to God, which I know upsets some readers, but I think the converse is much more upsetting if you really think about it. In short, do you really want to live in closed time, in which choice is an illusion, responsibility a mirage, and meaning impossible?

Let's go All the Way Down and Back, to the free launch of Genesis 1. If you approach the text without preconceptions, you will notice something striking. That is, God does not create the universe all at once, in one big abba-kabbalah, but rather, in stages. But if he already knows what's going to come out, what is the point of this?

The way the narrative is structured, it is as if God is surprised -- for why would he be pleased? -- by what is produced. For example, he begins by creating the heavens and earth, but the latter comes out a mess -- a dark and formless void -- so he tweaks it by shedding some light on the situation and dividing light from darkness.

But even then there are some problems with the rollout. No need to reprise the whole thing, but you get the picture: it is very much as if God creates and then stands back to judge what he has created before taking the next step. And this would be completely superfluous if God knows everything ahead of time.

It's just another way of emphasizing that God is really and truly Creator, and that his very own existence is the quintessence of openness and choice. There are always a multitude of possibilities, even -- or especially! -- in God. To me that's a comfort, not a conceit.

Indeed, I would say that the only reason we are open is that God is. Otherwise, an open mind in an open creation is completely inexplicable. It makes no sense at all.

However, I might add that, just as we are constrained and attracted by various transcendentals, e.g., love, truth, beauty, justice, unity, etc., so too is God constrained by his own nature, so to speak.

Which is why prophecy is indeed possible. Prophecy, which is a memoir of the future, is clearly distinct from history. History deals with the past, which is closed; but prophecy is a foreshadowing of the open future, therefore it cannot be as "exact" as history. Rather, it can provide general outlines and shapes of things to come, since it is apparently a vision of various attractors up above and ahead. But it's about the Big Picture, not the infinite and unknowable details.

Faithlessness Renders All Things Impossible

No sooner do I suggest that IT'S ALL SOMEHOW TRUE than, through a series of synchronicities, a fellow I'd never heard of with similar gnotions crosses my peripatetic readar. Looks like he calls it the Believing Game.

We all know about the Doubting Game, AKA critical thinking, but this must be supplemented by the Believing Game. Each is "needed in order to examine and accept an idea as true."

I infer from Professor Wiki's brief explanation that Elbow believes that in the West we are disproportionately devoted to the Doubting Game. Like everything else, that's true as far as it goes, but we need to bear in mind how the most critical thinkers are often the most credulous wankers.

For example, it takes an offal lot of rancid meatheadedness to arrive at something as dubious as scientism, or leftism, or catastrophic manmade global warming. Which is just the instantiation of a more general principle, that certain ideas are so foolish that only a person with a great deal of formal education could believe them.

(Look at the heroically tortuous reasoning laid out yesterday in Justice Breyer's dissent. In it he goes to great lengths to reveal everything we detest about lawyerly thinking -- the "lawyer game" -- which abuses reason to arrive at the desired result. There are now four idiots on the Supreme Court who have convinced themselves

"that speech is a sort of public good held in a collective trust, to be limited or banned whenever the majority feels that the speech in question might not be being used in furtherance of the proper ends."

Or in other words, that we have the right to free speech so long as it pleases the state. Bottom lyin': the founders were way ahead of their time, in that they created a totalitarian state before Marx, Hitler, and Stalin were even born.)

Anyway, it looks to me as if Elbow is proposing a kind of methodological orthoparadoxy that will be familiar to Raccoons. "Skeptical doubting" looks for "flaws in thinking that might look good." But "really good thinking also calls on a complementary methodology: conditionally trying to believe all ideas in order to find virtues in thinking that looks wrong."

That's not the clearest of explanations, but it strikes me as similar to what we've discussed before under the rubric of mental metabolism and assimilation. In short, there are catabolic (tearing down) and anabolic (building up) components to productive thinking.

Or, one might consider the Believing Game to be thinking in the mode of faith. The irony is that the excessively critical thinker doesn't even realize he's playing the Believing Game, because he has covertly elevated doubt to the axis of his belief system.

For example, this is precisely what Descartes is driving at in the cogito: not I think, therefore I am, but really, I doubt that I exist, therefore I must exist (as the doubter).

But how could we possibly define ourselves in wholly negative terms? This is the problem with Popper's principle of falsification, which is true as far as it goes. That is, he maintains that a statement can only qualify as scientific if it is falsifiable, i.e., if conditions can be specified in which the statement would not be true.

Again, that's a wholly negative way of defining truth, so it leaves us with no leg to stand on except for our own corrosive doubt. Which then starts eating through the floor.

The problem is, how do we prevent doubt from being omniscient? After all, there is nothing essential to the human condition that we cannot subject to our ruthless doubt, including love, language, God, beauty, natural rights, free will, meaning, and the very possibility of knowing truth.

It's not so much that all things are possible with faith, but that faith makes all things possible. Monomaniacal doubt only renders all things impossible.

It's All True!

If religious predestination or secular determinism are the case, then becoming is pointless -- because we are already there -- and freedom is nothing -- since it is only the illusion of choice.

And to say there is no becoming and no freedom is another way of saying there is no time, only eternity.

Or -- stick with me here -- time is reduced to space. Thus, any so-called "choice" one makes in the present is actually just the backward extension of a future which has already happened. What looks like a photograph to us is just part of a giant flip book, in which the next picture is already in place, giving the illusion of motion (motion being synonymous with change).

Weird, I know. But plenty of people believe the cartoon, both religious and secular. In fact, speaking of animation, this would mean that Life Itself is also a kind of illusion of movement.

Which is precisely why physics is powerless to deal with Life, because there is no principle in physics that can distinguish between living and nonliving matter. It's all just the same atoms in a different pattern, that's all.

As we've said before, this profoundly unbiblical idea is a Greek import. One reason why science never developed in ancient Greece was that time and change were considered existential defects, so to speak -- like rust, or corrosion, or dandruff. Everything available to the senses is just a more or less imperfect copy of something from the timeless world of pure form. There is appearance and there is reality, and never shall the twain meet on the same twack.

In fact, when Paul makes that cwack about the gospel representing foolishness to the Greeks, this is what he is referring to. The Greek mind could never wrap itself around the idea of the timeless world getting mixed up in the temporal, or of the loftiest principle taking the form of a filthy, screaming infant, no matter how breathtaking the baby.

Yes, there is an absolute and there is a contingent. But for the excessively Platonized mind, the absolute is not "in" the contingent, any more than you are really in a photo of yourself. Just as it would be absurd to suggest that you could jump into a photograph of yourself, God by definition cannot enter the contingent, i.e., that which only exists because it is a distant reflection of, or accidental emanation from, the One.

Note that in the Greek view, God is wholly abstract, a point to which we will later return. Unlike in the Christian view, the Greek One is definitely not a concrete person. Which is why neoplatonism involves ascending up and out of the body and extinguishing all traces of one's accidental self.

I read somewhere that Augustine was once a neoplatonist and that he never quite shook its acute somaphobia. The greatest neoplatonist of them all, Plotinus, was said to be absolutely ashamed of the mere fact of having a body.

I'm thinking maybe he was just embarrassed about the nose:

I say that predestinistas and other fatalists are tossing out the most essential and shocking news in the good news -- or even the news that makes it good. Indeed, what does make the news good? That everything that has ever happened and will ever happen to you is preordained, so you might as well give up now?

That would be a tough sell, in my opinion. You think the Jehovah's Witnesses have a rough time of it? Imagine Paul going door to door and announcing,

"Hello. I have some good news for you. I am here because I am predestined to be here, as are you. I am compelled to tell you about a vision I had about this Jesus fellow, which you will either accept or not accept, depending upon how God has programmed you...

"And if I refuse?"

"Doesn't matter. God already knows who's saved and who's damned, so I wouldn't worry about it."

Now, it would be a mistake to minimize the appeal of this metaphysic to certain spiritual types. As we've said before, all valid big-box religions are all full-service operations that cater to the individual. This is more explicitly expressed in the East, in particular, with the various paths of yoga, e.g., karma yoga, hatha yoga, jnana yoga, raja yoga, bhakti yoga, etc. Different yokes for different folks.

I would suggest that the innocent fideism of the simple predestinista is an example of bhakti yoga, in which there is an absolute trust that whatever happens happens for the best. Naturally this helps to cultivate spiritual peace in the face of all these damn cosmic fluctuations, oscillations, enigmas, and annoyances. It's an easy yoke, but not everyone gets it -- specifically, those with a different makeup and different spiritual needs.

You could say that it is a transparently childlike approach, and not necessarily with any pejorative connotation. Bhakti yoga is "efficacious for fostering love of, faith in, and surrender to God. It is a means to realize God, and is the easiest way for the common person because it doesn't involve extensive yogic practices."

And as a matter of fact -- and I've been thinking about this lately -- just as all philosophies are "true," there is a little bhakti in everyone, right?

Wait -- all philosophies are true? Yes, I've been noticing lately how virtually every philosophy has an element of truth to it. It's just that the philosopher gets all carried away with his little piece if the puzzle, and elevates it to the whole existentialida.

You name the philosopher, and I'll show where he was right, even Nietzsche, or Hegel, or Kant, or Derrida. (Was that distant thunder, or was that Van's head exploding?)

To come full circle, I would even say that the predestinistas are ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. As far as they go.

I wanted to get into an allied subject, to wit: what is necessary in order for existence to be possible? Or in other words, what are the necessary conditions of existence, or conditions without which existence cannot exist? I think that by answering these questions, we might be able to understand how it is possible for it All to be True, i.e., how all these halfwits can be half right.

God is a Mathmagician

It seems to me that if existence is to exist, there are certain things that even God cannot know about it. This would necessarily follow from his own infinitude.

In short, if God is infinite, then he cannot be known, even by himself, because to know something is to render it finite, and God cannot be something other than God, i.e., infinite.

Take for example, number. Does God know the last number? Of course not. Numbers go on forever. There is no end and therefore no boundary in which to enclose them.

To exist requires boundaries, which is why it is proper to say that God doesn't "exist" to begin with. Creatures exist. The Creator does not. "Existence" is a property of, or analogy to, something else.

Schuon defines matter as "the sensible manifestation of existence as such." This implies that there are insensible manifestations of existence, which indeed there are. That is to say, all matter in existence is suffused with boundaries which are the effect of ideas.

Or in other words, as Schuon writes, "form is the manifestation of an 'idea,'" or "of a particular possibility." Thus, both form and substance, idea and matter, are limitations on possibility, rendering the infinite finite.

Even so, there is always nonlocal unity beneath the local diversity, which one might say is a shadow of the Absolute.

For example, although number goes on forever, there is no conceivable number that could be so far out as to become "detached" from the rest. Underneath the diversity of mathematics is always a continuum of unity; math is just multiples of one, or the endless variety of One-ness: unity prolonged. Even a fraction -- i.e., less than one -- must still partake of oneness, or it couldn't be defined.

Ah, but what about irrational numbers such as pi? Pi has "no solution." It has no end and therefore no boundary. As such, even God cannot know it, since it trails off into infinity, just as he does. So, does pi exist?

I don't know. I've never thought about it before. I would say that this only goes to show that there exist truths that cannot be proved with strict logic. In other words, we know that there must be a constant ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle, even if it cannot be reduced to a fully rational expression.

Maybe the problem is that circles don't actually exist, any more than points or lines do. Rather, these are mental abstractions, pure forms that are never seen in matter. Or to plagiaphrase Benoit Mandelbrot, clouds aren't spheres, mountains aren't cones, coastlines aren't circles, and bark isn't smooth.

Speaking of Mandelbrot, one of his bestest ideas is that -- and I'm expressing this in my own way -- the immanent is just as infinite as the transcendent. For example, a coastline is not actually a finite boundary, but rather, is infinite. Thus, Tonga, for instance, is actually "enclosed in infinity."

How can that be, since infinity by definition cannot be closed? Well, let's say you are tasked to measure the coastline(s) of Tonga. Now, we all know that Tonga consists of 176 islands. Forget about that. We just want you to measure one of them. How would you begin? With a big tape measure? What about all the little nooks and crannies along the coastline, all the individual grains of sand, not to mention the molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles?

It turns out that nature is such a rough place that even the toughest Tongan couldn't possibly measure it, because

"the measured length of a stretch of coastline depends on the scale of measurement. Empirical evidence suggests that the smaller the increment of measurement, the longer the measured length becomes. If one were to measure a stretch of coastline with a yardstick, one would get a shorter result than if the same stretch were measured with a one-foot (30cm) ruler.

"This is because one would be laying the ruler along a more curvilinear route than that followed by the yardstick. The empirical evidence suggests a rule which, if extrapolated, shows that the measured length increases without limit as the measurement scale decreases towards zero" (Professor Wiki, emphasis Professor Wacky).

Wo. Let's pause here for a moment so as to allow you to assimilate this wonderful orthoparadox: the more accurately we measure something, the longer it is, to the point that perfect measurement equates to infinity?

CIBSPFY! (Can I buy some pot from you?)

This truth can be depicted visually via fractals. Magnify the itsiest bitsy of a fractal and you will see another beautiful fractal. There is no "last fractal," any more than one could find the last snowflake before they start repeating themselves. Or write the last poem. Or compose the last melody. Or bleat the last blog post.

(Which reminds me a line from the Wake that sez When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit.)

Again: the infinitude proceeds both up, into transcendence, and down, into immanence. And I would suggest that the same principle can assist us in thinking about God, who overflows and spills into and out of everything, just as Meister Eckhart claimed.

What exactly did he claim? Oh, for example, "Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature -- even a caterpillar -- I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature."

Or "Earth cannot escape heaven. Flee it by going up, or flee it by going down, heaven still invades the earth..."

Or "God forever creates and forever begins to create, and creatures are always being created and in the process of beginning to be created."

I guess that's the "end," even if no such thing is possible...

Where Reason is Going, Religion is Already Gone

The wife has become fascinated by the figure of Saint Paul. His story exemplifies many of the issues we've been discussing, because if everything he accomplished was foreordained, then what's the point?

Again, that kind of vulgarized omniscience reduces to absolute nihilism. I don't see any way around that conclusion. If someone can explain otherwise, feel free. But a cosmos without freedom is a cosmos without even the possibility of meaning.

It's not just the risks Paul took in traveling to strange places and preaching to usually hostile crowds. Think about the fact that he would only spend a week or two, but apparently leave with a handful of converts.

But what did it mean to "convert" back then? It certainly had nothing to do with sola scriptura, since the Gospels were decades away and the New Testament wouldn't be canonized for centuries.

Even more astonishing is how the message "stuck," and how the newly converted didn't simply revert to what they had previously believed before the excitement of the apostle's visit. To insist that it was all simply predetermined is to drain it of all majesty, mystery, and heroism. Nothing to see here. Literally -- any more than there is anything to learn by interrogating a cog in a machine. The cog simply does what it does because it has been preprogrammed to do it.

Now, was there an element of divine causation here? Obviously. It's called the Holy Spirit, AKA God. But how does the HS operate? Via material or efficient causation, again, like a linear machine in a Newtonian cosmos?

I don't think so. Rather, it seems to me that the HS is the quintessential case of formal and final causation: it doesn't so much push from behind as pull from ahead or above. But we are always free to resist the attraction.

I mean, c'mon. Is there really a human being who hasn't passively ignored or actively resisted this attraction? What is sanctity if there is no resistance to the sanctifying energies? Does it really make sense to insist that Charles Manson and Pope John Paul II simply followed the path of least resistance? For there is no conceivable path with less resistance than predestination, since there is nothing to resist and no one to resist it.

I feel like I'm championing the obvious, but there are obviously many people who believe the absurdity of predestination, and not just Muslims and Jansenists.

Rather, it is an implicit secular dogma, the reason being that there is no scientistic principle -- and no possibility of one -- that can account for our free will, which mysteriously dangles from above like an invisible thread of possibility. Therefore, it "must" be impossible and illusory.

Which immediately begs the question of how one could possibly know this if one has no choice in the matter. It's not even incoherent, because being incoherent requires the possibility of coherence.

As alluded to yesterday, the very first thing we learn about God is that he creates. God has many names, but the first one -- before redeemer, before judge, before math wiz -- is Creator. Does this word have any real meaning, or is it just poetic, not to be taken literally? Because to literally create must involve freedom, which is why machines, Marxists, and Muslims (collectively speaking) do not create.

How did we reach this point of madness? By losing our mind. Topping writes that because "modernity pretends to offer a creed more universal than the Church's," the West needs a "renewal and recovery of its own mind."

The western mind has a source, a ground, a purpose and a destiny, but now the tenured spend their days tediously sawing off the diseased branch they sit upon, and then pretending it's a new and better tree.

"When religion is gone," writes Topping, "reason is going." Or in other words, where reason is crumbling, God has already left the building, since God is the principle that renders reason more than an absurcular tautology. And an enclosed world without reason or freedom has a name: hell.

Torn Between Two Nothings

Let's try to summarize, which we rarely do, since we don't look back as often as we should in order to make sure previously colonized ground hasn't reverted to unsettled bewilderness and repopulated with native parasites.

We started down this cosmic artery -- well, to be honest, I think it all started sometime last fall, with Hartshorne and then Berdyaev, and has ramified into various iterations since then, never quite getting back to the point, which is what now?

Near as I can tell, it all began last October, with the shocking annunciation of my cosmic orientation, and we've been circling that strange attractor ever since: freedom, necessity, process, creativity, contingency, predetermination; in short, the universally necessary truths of existence.

Or, more specifically, I suppose you could say we've been trying to play Tradition in the key of process, or to weave an area rug out of God's facticity and human freedom -- a freedom which is pure nothingness in the absence of God's facticity, but another kind of bupkis if it is totally predetermined and foreknown by God. I say man is torn -- and (re)born -- between two tempting nothings: existentialism and predeterminism.

As I've said all along, in order to make this work, I think we need to tweak what we mean when we refer to divine omniscience. With the usual understanding, we render the term more banal than it actually is, basically turning God into the ultimate human know-it-all. But I think we need to dig beneath the surface of human thought in order to seek a better analogy.

Speaking of thought, I came across a provocative but self-evidently true statement in Topping, to the effect that "No other institution has been thinking about thinking as long as the church has." One of my problems with protestantism is that it doesn't adequately think about thinking, but rather, assumes a lot of thinks that end up predetermining how scripture will be interpreted, so that its conclusions are often metaphysical assumptions in disguise.

To cite one prominent example: if predeterminism is impossible in principle -- if it simply cannot be the case without rendering everything else we know incomprehensible -- then if our theology ends there, we need to rethink our assumptions.

To put it the other way around, if predeterminism is the case, then neither truth nor thinking are human possibilities. They are absolutely foreclosed, for the same reason freedom is nullified. Thus, truth and thinking are entirely bound up with freedom. This is a true ontological trinity: freedom/truth/thinking, or, in a word, creativity.

I have devoted many posts to thinking² (thinking about thinking), and one recurrent theme is that it involves not one but two distinct processes, one more developed than the other. Anyone can think. But thinking about thinking is an open system -- a dissipative structure -- on a higher level.

If we borrow an analogy from biology, you could say that the body as a whole "thinks about cells," so to speak. Each cell is alive, or like an independent thought. The organism is a higher thought that organizes all the subordinate cellular-thoughtlings.

Now let's abruptly shift gears and see how this applies to theology. Topping writes that faith "impart[s] to our freedom a distinct form." Oh? How could that be, if faith is simply assent to closed and settled "truths"? Isn't that the opposite of freedom?

Yes, in the same sense that if one of your cells decides to go rogue and metastasize into cancer, it is finally freeeeeeee! While it lasts. It seems to me that that sort of cancerous freedom is analogous to the absolute nothingness of existential freedom.

Perhaps we need to posit a Thinking³, which is God thinking about us. For there is revelation, and there is our response to it. This is clearly different in principle from thinking about our own thoughts. Revelation is "about God," but it is really more "about man," in that we obviously cannot comprehend God -- again, in principle -- but it is possible for God to provide a way for men to think about him. Thus, we could say that revelation is "God in the mode of man."

I might add that this would be the Whole Point of the Incarnation, wouldn't it? Prior to that there is incargnosis and there are incarnotions, but this is something entirely apart: Word made flesh, and therefore flesh made Word -- a text, a narrative, an intelligible corpus.

For Topping, "faith makes you truly human." It "defines and so limits thought through its dogmas, its institutions, its traditions," but that is hardly the end of it. Rather, only the Beginning, for faith "also liberates": "By imposing limits faith frees thought and action from futility and can render them divine."

I think this is perfectly analogous to Polanyi's distinction between tacit and focal (or from-->to) knowledge. That is, revelation provides God-given boundary conditions that allow thinking to vault to a higher sphere. This is the quintessential expression of human freedom, just as the fixed rules of spelling and grammar allow us with virtually every utterance to say something we've never said before in the same way.

Which is why, if you follow me, postmodernism is a terminal cancer of the mind. Or in other words, it consigns us to mere freedom, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

The Accidentally on Purpose Driven Life

This post is either a leisurely ramble through hyperspace or a self-indulgent burden on loyal readers. Either way, you might need to read it slowly in order to digest it, assuming it is digestible.

To say that we are free is to say that things are possible. To say they are possible is to say they aren't absolutely necessary. Necessity is a prolongation of the absolute, while possibility partakes of the infinite. So there.

But there are two kinds of possible, one of which being necessary. To paraphrase Schuon, since the past happened, it was obviously possible. But now that it has happened, it has transitioned to necessity, although it can bring about new possibilities in the present.

Is man possible or necessary? Or what? The contemporary view is that man was (obviously) possible but completely unnecessary. I think Gould said something to the effect that if (hypothetically speaking) a mudslide had wiped out one of those freakish organisms in the Burgess Shale half a billion years ago, it might have resulted in a nul de slack in the road that leads directly to us. We are so tenuous as to have one foot on a banana peel and the other on a mudslide.

Can it all really be that contingent? After all, it isn't just that one mudslide. Rather, the chemical, geological, geographical, biological, and meteorological accidents leading to the emergence of man would have to be infinite, literally incalculable. That's not a very satisfying explanation. Doesn't mean it isn't true. But it does mean that there can be no possible ontological foundation for our existence -- nothing whatsoever on which to stand, nothing to hold, nothing necessary. Nothing but a somehow generative matrix of nothing.

No wonder man has always wondered about the Great Changeless Being behind, beneath, or beyond the world of appearance and contingency. We intuitively realize that there can be no change in the absence of the changeless, or the world would be pure chaos. Therefore, it is easy enough to prove the existence of "God" with our natural reason, but that doesn't get us very far, does it?

"Which, among all the innumerable possibilities of a world," asks Schuon, "are the ones that will actually be manifested?"

Or in other words, is there some kind of restraint on possibility, some type of boundary condition that channels possibility in certain directions? Modern thought has eliminated this way of thinking, even if it is impossible to think without it. Being that it is one side of a complementarity, it will simply return through the side door in deusguised form.

In response to the question posed above, Schuon suggests that there is indeed a divine constraint, so to speak, on the realm of infinite possibility, in that the latter will manifest as "those which by their nature are most in conformity, or are alone in conformity, with the realization of a divine plan."

Thus, the "divine plan" causes certain possibilities to undergo the formality of becoming. If the world consists of flowing water, then the divine plan is the banks of the river. If not for the banks, then history would be just a... a chaotic flood.

One is reminded of Genesis, where the spirit of God is hovering over the primordial ocean and proceeds to divide the upper from the lower waters.

The primordial ocean is nothing, since it is without boundary or distinction. Thus, that first boundary is the mother of all fruitful boundaries, say, between self and other, man and woman, subject and object, etc. Existence is a tapestry of these fruitful complementarities, but not a directionless one. Rather, they seem to be guided by the longing or gnostalgia for a return to wholeness and unity, back to their undivided principle

If the intellect is not a mirror of God, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to explain how it got here. I say this because intelligence deals in necessity. Indeed, the true and the necessary are somewhat synonymous, as in mathematical and logical truths.

As such, how can a purely accidental being know anything of the necessary? Recall also what was said above about man's perennial search for the necessary behind the contingent. How does man even posit such a thing, let alone know it?

Apropos of nothing or maybe something: is a church God's embassy on earth, or is it our embassy in heaven?

In any event, it seems to me that it is the quintessential meeting place of accident and necessity, or where we consciously set up diplomatic relations with the land of necessity, and hope to assimilate some of the latter into our accidental substance.

Where we differ from God is that he knows all the principles with all of their possibilities (and the facts that crystalize out of infinite possibility), whereas our intellect is limited to an excellent grasp of abstract and necessary principles, limited knowledge of possibilities, and just a tiny fraction of the facts.

It seems to me that the best things in life are free of pure order and pure chaos. Hartshorne suggests that the most interesting -- and beautiful -- things are composed of "unity-in-variety, or variety-in-unity; if the variety overbalances, we have chaos or discord; if the unity, we have monotony or triviality"; and "infinite triviality would be as bad as infinite chaos, since neither would have any value whatsoever."

So, could it be that God wants an interesting, beautiful, and valuable cosmos? If so, he has succeeded. I'm thinking that's what he means when he calls it "good."

Rebelling Against God and Darwin

If we're going to fall, we need a space in which to do so. This would be vertical space.

The fact that we fall provides the space with directionality. In other words, once we realize there is a down, this implies that there must be an up. We can also feel as if our lives are going nowhere, which implies being stuck at a certain level with no upward movement, just horizontal drift.

Now, I think everyone recognizes this space, even if they pretend to be otherthanwise. Even a nihilist wants to be a better nihilist than those other nobodies. Look at Nietzsche: he longed to be the superstud, even though I don't believe he ever kissed a girl.

Sometimes vertical space can be in-verted, so the person imagines that worse is better and lower is higher. Think of Miley Cyrus, who is convinced that if she can only debase herself a little more thoroughly, she will reach some sort of pinnacle of crudity. Why is this perfectionist so driven, so hard on herself?

These inverts think they are pushing the envelope when they are just being pulled by gravity. Being consciously unaware of vertical gravity, they don't realize that the whole point is to push back against it.

My son has been learning about space, so he knows that on the moon he could jump much higher, since gravity is only one sixth of what it is here. However, if we lived on the moon, our bones would be much thinner and our muscles much weaker. So, resistance breeds strength.

The same applies to vertical space, where adversity is the mother of evolution. Indeed, Obama didn't have to do anything for the world to know he is a weakling. He's a doctrinaire leftist, and that's enough. The notion of "San Francisco liberal" evokes the image of a flabby being devoid of substance because he lives in a world without restraint. As such, he never develops any vertical bone, muscle or sinew.

Some people think that religiosity is actually a covert form of surrender to vertical gravity. This is implicitly what they mean when they accuse us of, say, weakness, or intellectual cowardice, or an infantile need for security. I assure you that Bill Maher believes himself to be above you in vertical space, even while he categorically denies its existence.

Topping makes an interesting point, that scripture and tradition do not, as it were, chain us to the port, but rather, "serve as a fixed rudder" for our journey across an unknown sea.

I mean, you are free to build your own little dinghy and set off without a map, but it is doubtful that you'll get anywhere or even survive the trip. Or, you'll go "somewhere," just as you will if you put on a blindfold and get behind the wheel of your car.

At the top of vertical space is God. In my opinion, this is a necessary truth that should be self-evident. In other words, if there is a vertical scale, it has a top. The top is what conditions everything below, and allows us to know the hierarchy.

Conversely, to say there is no top is to say there is no truth and that all is relative. And if all is relative, there is only power. To the extent that there is truth or right, it can only be a cynical mask for power and might.

Schuon makes the soph-evident (which means as evident to wisdom as are material objects to the eye) point that "To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence."

For the same reason, "Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses."

Collapses into what? Yes, into nothing. But nothing is never empty. Rather, this is the Machiavellian or Nietzschean nothing of raw, amoral power.

To say that man uniquely partakes of the vertical and horizontal is to say that he is both free and determined. But freedom and determination exist in both modes. Our fundamental spiritual freedom is vertical, but this freedom would mean nothing without certain restraints, boundary conditions, archetypes, and final causes that help orient and vault us upward.

Horizontally we are restrained by such things as genes, culture, custom, and the like, but we are also "free" in the existential sense of being "condemned to nothingness."

This latter must be the conclusion of any honest atheist or materialist, in that the denial of vertical space means that man has this absurd and inexplicable freedom with which to do or be anything he wishes. There are no restraints except horizontal ones. Again, in this view freedom equates to nothingness, as Sartre well knew.

Schuon suggests that our determinacy and indeterminacy, our restraint and freedom, are iterations of Absolute and Infinite, respectively. Here again, this is something "everyone knows" by virtue of being human, even if they express it in a confused and garbled manner that generates absurdity.

For example, when some tenured yahoo claims that we have no free will and are completely determined by our genetic inheritance, that is Absoluteness in action.

Being that Absolute and Infinite are complementary, we must ask: where did the infinite go? It comes out in the doctrine of radical relativism, in which things are "good" merely by virtue of being instantiations of "diversity." In other words, since nothing can be judged on the vertical scale, infinite plurality takes the place of a vertical standard.

This leads to the absurdity of, say, Facebook providing users with 51 options for gender. The idea of male-female is rejected on vertical grounds, of course; but also on horizontal grounds. In other words, they don't just reject metaphysics and theology, but biology and natural selection as well.

So, if Darwin tries to claim you're a man or a woman, well, you tell Darwin to fuck off! Who does he think he is, God?

An Urgent Memo from the Centers for Spiritual Disease Control

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to minimize just how rotten I think mankind is. It's just that the folks are okay. People I like. But mankind as a whole? Rabble. And that's on a good day.

As we all know, the left -- as with everything else -- has it backward and upside down: they are absolutely in luuuv with mankind. It's the people they can't stand.

Conversely, conservatives place little faith in mankind, hence our distrust of various collective schemes and scams, from the UN to Obamacare to the core curriculum. But we love people. Which is why we want to protect them from these destructive schemes and scams.

I think the abstract love of mankind explains the whole basis and moonb'attitude of punitive liberalism. I mean, if Obama loves us so much, why force this punitive legislation down our throats? Rather, why not allow us the freedom to choose it? First and foremost because we would never choose it, since we are not masochists.

At the same time, conservatives who respect our autonomy and maturity are characterized by the left as not caring about us. Thus, common courtesy and respect are indifference, while condescension and pandering are care.

(You know, if only words could be restored to their original meaning, it would go a long way toward arresting this damn FAAALLLLLLL we're in.)

Blacks, for example, are too stupid to choose the best schools for their children. Thus, the decision must be left to compassionate union thugs and their political pawns such as Mayor de Blasio. That's what you call pure, disinterested benevolence: phil-anthropy, love of mankind in action. Duck!

A thought just occurred to me. Is occurring rather. Wait for it... Here it comes... Ouch! It's a big one: LEFTISM PRETENDS TO PROVIDE THE CURE FOR MAN. WITHOUT. EVER. DIAGNOSING. HIM.

To back up a bit, we've discussed in the past how each religion can be thought of as analogous to the practice of medicine, in the sense that each begins with a diagnosis for which it proposes a treatment or cure. Animals have no need of religion, since they don't have the disease. What disease?

Like I said, it depends. For Buddhists it is attachment to desire. For nudists it is attachment to clothing. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is the separation from God implied by the expulsion from Eden.

But the left proposes to cure man without ever explicitly stating what is wrong with man. Marx, for example, didn't think there was anything wrong with man that a little bloodbath couldn't cure. This flagrant misanthrope pretended to believe that the problem was in the capitalist system, not in man (as if some other species invented capitalism). So, eliminate all the capitalists, and problem solved.

Truly, -- and I mean this literally -- the left is the disease it pretends to cure. Again, since it never acknowledges the disease, it just ends up being another iteration of it. This is precisely why all revolutions just end up with a new and usually worse set of assouls in power. Why? Because they are assouls, that's why. What did you expect? Sugar Candy Mountain?

A reader just alerted me to an article by David Goldman (AKA Spengler) which I'll bet is relevant, The Rise of Secular Religion:

"Today’s American liberalism, it is often remarked, amounts to a secular religion: it has its own sacred texts and taboos, Crusades and Inquisitions. The political correctness that undergirds it, meanwhile, can be traced back to the past century’s liberal Protestantism."

Yes, exactly -- except they don't call the disease sin or the cure salvation. Or, they give us the chemo but never call it cancer. So, we lose our hair and vomit all day, but no one knows why, because the liberals won't tell us.

Nor do they call it "religion," even though "the inner life of secular Americans remains dense with spiritual experience," and "post-Protestant experience resembles the supernatural world of the Middle Ages, but with new spiritual entities in place of the old devils and elves."

For the left, these demons are everywhere except in fallen human beings. With one exception to that exception: in demon-ridden conservatives. I can't top Bottum -- not that there's anything wrong with it -- who writes that

"These horrors have a palpable, almost metaphysical presence in the world. And the post-Protestants believe the best way to know themselves as moral is to define themselves in opposition to such bigotry and oppression -- understanding good and evil not primarily in terms of personal behavior but as states of mind about the social condition" (emphasis mine).

"Sin, in other words, appears as a social fact, and the redeemed personality becomes confident of its own salvation by being aware of that fact. By knowing about, and rejecting, the evil that darkens society."

Again: they see -- and feel -- the disease, only they misname and displace it. For if sin is the illness and mankind is the carrier, the left is seen for what it is: the pernicious disease vector of a deadly plague. Like human beings, only worse.

Thoughts on the Fall of Man: How Low Did We Go?

How low did we go when we blunderwent our primordial calamity, or whatever you want to call it? Probably better not to name it at all, which is what Joyce did(n't) in the Wake. Rather, just describe it empirically and call it what you will, since you will anyway.

But whatever it is, it shadows man all through history, both individually and collectively. It's what causes this nightmare from which we are trying to awaken. Or, it is the net we are attempting to fly through. Apparently it can't be done -- like surpassing the speed of light or kissing your elbow.

Wisdom consists first and foremost in knowing this, for if you don't, you are about to reenact a very old myth or to invent a whole new way of falling on your face -- and thus serve as a cautionary lesson to others. The best you can hope for is to have the myth named after you, like ignominious pratfallers such as Prometheus, Pandora, Narcissus, or Icarus.

"In Christian theology, the fall of man is a term used to describe the transition of the first man and woman from a state of innocent obedience to God to a state of guilty disobedience."

The term, of course -- like Trinity -- is not found in the Bible, and if I am not mistaken, the whole idea of "original sin" is foreign to Judaism. I mean, they accept the wisdom of the myth, but they do not take it to mean that man is so hopelessly corrupted and steeped in sin that he can't get out of his own way.

So there is a range of possible lessons one may derive from the myth, which is proved by the manner in which different Christian denominations interpret it. If we place them in a left-right continuum, reader Nomo would be situated at the extreme right. He maintains that the fall leaves us thoroughly depraved in "all areas of our being, body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions, etc.," and that even the intellect -- which is obviously designed to know truth -- cannot do so, which is "One of the purposes for the revealed truth of scripture." In other words, if you think, then you're wrong.

In support of the latter, he cites Acts 17:11, where Paul is preaching to a group of Jews, reasoning "with them from the Scriptures." So it seems self-evident to me that he is employing his powers of reason in conjunction with revelation (which is the very definition of theology), but we'll let that go. Anyway, it says that Paul succeeded in persuading some of them, presumably based upon the "suffering servant" motif (Christians regard the servant as Jesus, whereas Jews identify the servant as Israel).

Later in the chapter our boys are preaching to another synagogue, where the members again listen to Paul's pitch and search the scriptures to check its plausibility. Some accept it, others reject it. Same scripture, mind you. Verticalisthenics is hardly analogous to math or logic, the latter of which indeed function to test and cleanse our untrustworthy intellect. Rather, there's more than one way to scan a catechesis, or there wouldn't be so many interpretations and denominations.

It seems to me that the fall is primarily located in the will, not the intellect. This would explain how, for example, 20th century man could know so much more than his predecessors, and yet, be an even bigger assoul. Nomo cites Romans 3 in support of the rotten-to-the-core thesis. Paul is pretty fired up, but I would still see it as mainly reproaching the will. I'm no Bible wiz, but it seems to me that you have to appreciate the context, as he's saying that even exact conformity to Jewish law -- right deeds -- won't save you. I doubt that many contemporary Jews believe this anyway. Maybe some ultra-Orthodox.

Let me get back to that Wiki article. It says that "For many Christian denominations the doctrine of the fall is closely related to that of original sin. They believe that the fall brought sin into the world, corrupting the entire natural world, including human nature, causing all humans to be born into original sin..."

This I do not buy -- i.e., that sin is rooted in our DNA, as it were -- unless we take it to mean that there is something about human nature that makes the will -- free will -- problematic.

Situated to the left of Nomo would be Orthodox Christianity, which "accepts the concept of the fall but rejects the idea that the guilt of original sin is passed down through generations, based in part on the passage Ezekiel 18:20 that says a son is not guilty of the sins of his father." I am on board with the these ancient Christians, who never forget that man is still in the image of Creator, even if he does everything in his power to soil the mirror.

Ah, this I can use: "Catholic exegesis of Genesis 3 claims that the fall of man was a 'primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.'"

I can use this because another way of saying it is that history -- whatever that is -- begins with the Fall. Therefore, it is not just an indictment of man, but a metaphysical principle we may use to understand both history and the direction of time (which amount to the same thing).

That is, there is no history in the absence of the will, which is to say, human freedom. Prior to the emergence of freedom, there is only prehistory: physics, or chemistry, or biology. But the first "human" who makes a free choice is the first human, fool stop, and in so doing he initiates this mess called history. Thus, the origin of history is again in the will.

So if we tweak Genesis 3 a bit, it's a theory of historiography, or of historogenesis. You could say that history runs on free willpower, but often degenerates to plain willfulness.

At any rate, if the Fall primarily affects the will, then that is where the cure must lay. I've heard Dennis Prager mention that Jews do not condemn a person for having "evil thoughts," any more than we are guilty for the deeds we do in our dreams. Rather, they focus on outward behavior, on the will. It matters not what you think or how you feel, but what you do.

At antipodes to this is contemporary leftism, in which it only matters how one feels, not what one actually does. Thus, Obama can immiserate the poor, wreck the healthcare system, stick it to blacks, explode the debt, aggravate income inequality, and make us Putin's bitch, so long as his heart is in the right place. However, the rest of us can see that his will is in the wrong place, and that is what counts.

Ironically, there is a parallel between the Obama view and the Nomo view, in that both presume that we do not know -- and cannot know -- what is good for us, so we need outside intervention (as always, leftism is a Christian heresy). (To be clear: I agree that we need outside intervention, but that we must accept it in freedom, i.e., with the will.)

In his Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin writes of how, for the leftist, it is acceptable to "coerce men in the name of some goal... which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt."

And, "once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies" and to bully or oppress or sic the IRS on them. I do this "on behalf of their 'real' selves," secure in the knowledge that if they weren't in a state of sin, they would behave exactly as I wish them to behave. So, it's good for them.

So, we're back to time, freedom, and history. If we only remove your freedom to choose -- say, your doctor or school or means of self-defense -- we can finally stop this damn thing called history. Or, as the Marxists say, real history can finally get underway.

"In the name of what," asks Berlin, "can I ever be justified in forcing men to do what they have not willed or consented to?" Answer: "Only in the name of some value higher than themselves" -- or in other words, something more precious and valuable than mere human beings. In this view, it is acceptable to treat human beings as means to this higher end, an end which only the elect -- the already saved -- can know.

Even God Can't be a Little Bit Pregnant

As we've discussed in the past, we are confronted with a number of irreducible complementarities -- we call them orthoparadoxes, but that term is probably getting stale -- such as time/eternity, form/substance/, male/female, wave/particle, individual/collective, subject/object, part/whole, I/thou, etc.

We can attempt to think beyond these by choosing one side over the other, but doing so always comes at the expense of sneaking in properties of the excluded term through the backdoor.

For example, if you really choose object over subject, then the conversation must stop then and there, because objects don't think or speak. Thus, to even acknowledge the bare existence of material objects is to simultaneously acknowledge the existence of subjects. Call it the Law of the Excluded... sibling or something.

Now, one of these complementarities has to be Absolute/Relative. As with the others, we can try to think beyond this orthoparadox, but doing so will simply generate paradox -- the bad kind.

I call a bad paradox any idea that negates itself or simply generates unthinkable absurdity.

Take, for example, determinacy/indeterminacy. To affirm the former over the latter is to affirm nothing, because the affirmed is simply the necessary. Only if there is contingency can we know the necessary. Likewise, if predestination is true, then we couldn't know it. (For similar reasons, if natural selection is the sufficient cause of man, man couldn't know it.)

Hartshorne asks a naughty theo-logical question, that is, "What is the basic logic of the assumption that relativity is primary, not absoluteness?"

Yes, there are passages in scripture suggesting the primacy of absoluteness, but there are also passages implying otherwise. Besides, Hartshorne is inquiring into the "basic logic," and perhaps the logic is necessary in order to sort out conflicting passages in scripture.

For example, if there is a passage suggesting the sun revolves around the earth, we can safely (and appropriately) ignore it, because it conflicts with observation and reason.

In a more general sense, is it helpful to conceptualize a Creator who gives us the precious gift of intelligence, only to ignore it in transmitting his most important communication to us? Why then do we have the intelligence, if it only gets in the way? Or, to what is the revelation addressed? To stupidity? Credulity? Fantasy?

Could be. But this places intelligent people in a bind, because then they are forced to choose between intellect and God.

Let's begin with some definitions of relative: "considered in relation or in proportion to something else"; "a being or object posited by virtue of its relations"; "having mutual relation with each other."

Now, do we arrive at relativity via absoluteness? Or rather, do we posit absoluteness based upon our familiarity and intimacy with relativity?

For Hartshorne -- and for me, for what it's worth -- it is clearly the latter: "The concept of the non-relative is parasitic on that of the relative. Given the concept of relatedness, we can then by negation (itself an example of relativity) arrive at that of non-relatedness."

In other words, in everyday life, we confront nothing but a concrete (not abstract) web of relations. To the extent that things can exist apart from the web, this is always an abstraction. There is "absolutely" nothing that is radically separate from anything else, which is why it should have come as no metaphysical surprise -- the surprise of physicists notwithstanding -- that the quantum realm should reveal itself to be a field, a web, a network, and not a world of externally related parts.

True, there is the famous wave/particle complementarity, but of the two, which must be primary? (And please note, to say "primary" is not to exclude the complementary term, for there is still relation.)

I would suggest that the field must be primary, just as, say, our body is primary over the cells of which it is constituted, even though both are necessary. A bunch of cells does not equal a body, nor is the cosmos a pile of atoms.

Now, being relative means that what something is -- i.e., its identity -- "depends for being what it is upon some relation to another."

I don't know about you, but I find it fascinating that Christianity posits a God of "absolute relation." In other words, there is no God "beyond" the mutual indwelling and roundabout relations of F↔S↔HS. What a strange idea!

And yet, in my opinion, it accords with basic logic in a way that "absolute absoluteness," so to speak, cannot. Rather, in my opinion, absolute-absoluteness (AA for short) -- in which all relativity is bleached out -- is absurd and paradoxical.

An AA God, in whom relativity is denied, would, of course, be a changeless God. Thus, such a God would be neutral as to all alternatives and differences.

Interestingly, the radically un-judgmental God of the New Agers often approaches this ideal; for example, who are you to claim that God has an issue with homosexual marriage? Differences between the sexes are just human constructs, but in God there are no such distinctions, just absolute gooey oneness!

From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing. --Meister Eckhart

Well, that's about it for today. To be continued...

Shhh! The Liberals are Sleeping!

Must every post be important?

You know, in the old days, I had the occasional post consisting of unalloyed frivolousness and bleating heart gliberalism. Like this one.

Because. What a loaded word! X happened because Y. Very few events are that simple, and yet, our implicit collective metaphysic is founded on the idea that they are.

In other words, we pretend that everything has an unambiguous, linear explanation, when in reality few things do. Again, that kind of simple cause-and-effect is the exception, not the rule.

Okay. What is the rule, then? Anyone can say what it isn't.

I think it was Aristotle who defined philosophy as the search for ultimate causes. How do we know when we've reached an adequate, let alone ultimate, explanation? I suppose adequate explanations are sufficient to get us through the day, but if you're at all introspective, you'll very quickly see through the absurdity and even insanity of most of these.

The other evening I jotted down a murmurandom to myself. Let me go fetch it.

Don't get excited. It's no major epiphany or theophany or hahafunny. Says, and I quote, 'never had existential dream v. ontic dreams.' I can tell by the dashed off quality that it made sense at the time. I think I heard some sort of TV commercial in the background, talking about achieving your dreams.

It occurred to me that I never really had the dreams that seem to motivate so many people. And if you don't participate in the collective dream, then you are going to be marked out as an oddball. It only takes one person outside the dream to make all the dreamers feel awkward, uncomfortable, and self-conscious.

I wish I could remember the book -- I think it was the Coon Classic Violence Unveiled -- in which the author writes of how the presence of a neutral observer made savages feel very uncomfortable when they were about to enact one of their collective dreams, such as human sacrifice. "Must you stare at me like that when I'm about to plunge the blade into his throat? It's creepy."

It's as if the presence of the outsider makes the group aware of their dream-trance, when the whole point of the dream is to not realize it is one.

I remember a similar feeling on one of my first internships, which must have been in around 1987 or so. I didn't know much of anything, and being that I was still a liberal, I actually knew less than that. I was still naive about the ways of the world. Anyway, this internship was at an AIDS hospice in West Hollywood. I guess I was supposed to help people with their feelings or something, but the whole thing was rather ill-defined. I could only handle two afternoons.

Anyway, when I got there, I felt like an orthodox Jew at communion. You know how it is. Everyone stops talking. Sort of like Blazing Saddles: No, I said the shrink isn't a qu... GONG!

This is ridiculous. I'm just trying to entertain you, aren't I, to conceal the fact that this post isn't going anywhere?

Let's start over.

Everyone's got one. A BECAUSE, I mean. It seems to me that a group, in order to be one, must share the same Because, or inhabit the same social trance.

A trivial example, but my son's Little League team is the Cardinals. One of the dads is a lifetime Cubs fan who grew up in Chicago, so he absolutely cannot bring himself to wear a Cards hat. I told him I empathized, because if my son were unfortunate enough to be on the Giants, under no circumstances would I soil my dome with their skeevy merchandise.

Weird? Yes. But only because you don't dream Dodger blue. Any longtime Dodger fan shares the dream, and would know exactly how I feel. I mean, c'mon. This was during my first year as a fan, and I don't forget that easy:

Liberals and conservatives don't just differ on this or that policy, but inhabit different dreamworlds. Likewise Islamists. Or Paul Krugman, as discussed in yesterday's post, recklessly swinging those racist bats in his belfry. That he feels so free to spew such craziness means not only that there are plenty of people who share his dream, but that he seems to have never met anyone who doesn't. He's like the medieval peasant who has never actually seen a Jew, but only knows they have horns and cloven feet, as do Giants fans.

David Mamet uses the term "recognition symbols." You might think of these as outward cues about the dream a person inhabits: they are "the slang terms, jokes, and archetypes that minority groups employ to signal their understanding of and belonging with each other."

A contemporary liberal education -- especially at our finest universities -- consists essentially of "Nothing. Students learn five recognition symbols that make them comfortable in conversation with other people who know nothing."

Or in other words, they internalize the rudiments of the dream, so as to function without friction in the totalitarian dreamworld of the left.

There is friction of course, but only when they hear rumors of one of those conservatives with the horns and cloven feet. I mean, have you taken a good look at Megyn Kelly? I hear she's a monster!

The Insanely Powerful Intellect of Paul Krugman

Almost no time this morning...

Speaking of infinite variables, complex systems, nonlinear behavior, and human freedom, there is a relevant essay by Isaiah Berlin called The Concept of Scientific History. I haven't actually finished it, but he begins with a discussion of past attempts to treat history as a natural science, an enterprise which can succeed neither in practice nor in principle. Why is that?

Well, history deals with what we call "facts," but there are no historical laws from which these facts can be deduced, nor any strict inductive method for putting them together.

It seems that imagination is required at both ends, both in identifying and in synthesizing the historical facts into "history." But we all know that imagination easily veers into fantasy, or hordes of tenured revisionists would be out of business.

It is as if there is a kind of rupture in epistemology above physics and biology. Physics, of course, is the paradigmatic science, in that it advances not just by observation but by deductions which extend the reach of its powerful and coherent system. The whole existentialada is governed by a few laws with staggering implications.

But no one can do this with history except for Marxists and other progressives. Paul Krugman, for example, has it all figured out. As with physics, he has a powerful logico-deductive system that provides immediate answers to any historo-political question. In fact, Krugman's system is insanely powerful.

For example, why do conservatives believe what they believe? Because they -- we -- are racist. Political science is so easy, even a Nobel laureate can do it!

Krugman begins with the principle of racism, from which "facts" on the ground are then deduced. Unlike a sane person, he does not begin with the facts, i.e., with any actual racist. Indeed, he even says "there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist," but that doesn't matter. There was also no evidence of, say, the theory of relativity. Rather, it was initially deduced and only observed some two decades later.

Krugman implies that Charles Murray is a racist for simply writing of the well documented differences in IQ among different racial groups. If Murray is a racist, then so too is his own employer (two newspapers in one!). Which, in all fairness -- the leftist kind -- makes Krugman a vile racist as well. Hey, he makes the rules.

Krugman acknowledges that he is working from deduction in claiming that "race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics."

Or in other words, any time Krugman is confronted with an idea he doesn't understand, he submits it to his logico-deductive racial system, which promptly and dispassionately announces "Mystery solved." Simple as. Like Chris Matthews, minus the spittle.

By the way, it is not Krugman who is being simplistic and reductionist. Rather, it is those of us with different ideas. His system assures him that people with different policy preferences only hold them because racism is "all that [they've] got." We are intellectually and spiritually impoverished, not Krugman.

History is complex and change is hard. Is it any wonder that progressives such as Krugman cling so bitterly to simplicity, stasis, and slander? That's pretty much all they've got.

****

UPDATE:

Kind of like Obama, who constantly confuses "the ideas in his head with reality. It is not clear if he knows the difference." True, but at least he's in good company with fellow Nobelists such as Krugman, Carter, Arafat, and Gore.

Nevertheless, "ultimately, fantasy must yield to reality, falsehood to truth, superstition to science" (the Derb).

The Thou of Physics

What must physics be like in order for something as queer as an "I" to exist? And what must metaphysics be like in order for physics to go that way? (Not that there's anything wrong with it.)

Or, what must God be like? Mighty queer, I suppose. For He is indeed the Light in us loafers and shoegazers. Unless existence -- including its most striking feature -- tells us nothing about ultimate reality, however we conceptualize it.

Well, let's think about this. Is physics alone sufficient to account for the human subject? The official line from Big Academia is that nothing occurs in the cosmos -- or even can occur -- that violates the laws of physics. Oh sure, strange and unexpected things can and do happen. But there is always a purely naturalistic explanation.

This type of explanation always looks backward in a naive way that would embarrass a historian. A trained historian is supposed to have the Historian's Fallacy trained out of him, which is the tendency to view the past in light of how events turned out. At the time the events were occurring, no one, of course, had the historian's advantage of knowing exactly how they are going to play out. Hindsight can make you look much more clever than you actually are.

But not always. Leftists prove that it is just as possible to be afflicted with backward looking myopia despite the advantages of living in the present -- for example, in condemning Truman for nuking Japan, or ridiculing Ronald Reagan for his advocacy of the "Star Wars" missile defense, or vilifying people who correctly warned us about communist infiltration of the federal government.

We saw a typically childish version of this with the Iraq war, in which many of its most vocal supporters concluded that "Bush lied" only after things turned out badly. They pretended that perfect knowledge of the future had been available in the past. Which it never is, at least not for mortals, and perhaps not even for God.

But I think leftism in general is rooted in this fallacy. It is present in most everything they do. Even their current euphemism, "progressivism," presumes to know not just the content and direction of history, but the means to get there. Thus, Clinton sold us a "bridge to the 21st century," while Obama presumes to be "on the right side of history."

That last one is especially nefarious, because it is just a thinly veiled Marxist historicism, in which the future is known and it is the task of the Vanguard to get us there irrespective of fact, logic, or dissent.

Global warming is the same way: we know the future, so people who disagree with us need to be imprisoned. That means, what, more than half the population needs to be sent to the gulag? Whatever. Eggs & omelettes.

Now, only the simplest scientific system can predict the future. This can only occur when the variables are few and known, and operate in a linear manner, as in the solar system. The theoretical biologist Robert Rosen was the first of whom I am aware who argued that this type of system is the exception, not the rule, in the cosmos.

If Rosen is correct -- which I believe he is -- it would represent another one of those Copernican Revolutions. It would mean that our whole way of looking at the world is backward and upside down, because we are elevating a rare exception to our unifying principle. Metaphysically speaking, it doesn't get much worse than that.

I know what you're thinking: Bob, where are you going with this? Have you lost control of the bus? Or does it just appear so, based upon our imperfect knowledge of the future? And is the bus actually moving into the future, or is the future just flowing into the bus? Are you really driving, or is this thing like a monorail, with only one way to go?

The question is: do we determine reality -- even if just an itsy bitsy -- or does it determine us, right down to our last teensy weensy? And it doesn't matter whether we are determined by matter or God, because it amounts to the same thing: the primordial soup nazi barking no slack for you!

Now, according to Big Theology, God is Pure Being, with not so much as a jot or tittle of Becoming. For them, the gnosis is settled.

Well, we say: like anyone can know that, Napoleon.

Let's say it is true: God is pure Being. Let's lay out the implications. "If God is sheer being, devoid of becoming, then all becoming is external to Him, and yet He knows it" (Hartshorne).

But "Can the perfectly known be external to the knowing?" In other words, if total reality consists -- which it must -- of "the divine being and the worldly becoming," then it as if we are positing God as a part of the total reality -- the unchanging part. Does this make any sense?

A doctrine of Pure Being has implications for the Method of realizing its truth (again, all religiosity consists of Doctrine + Method). It would imply that nondual approaches such as Buddhism and Vedanta are correct, and that "the way to find God is to 'leave the world behind,' to turn from becoming altogether."

But the Judeo-Christian tradition assumes the opposite: that the world is the very field of our adventure in redemption. It is not some cosmic mistake or accident, any more than the baseball diamond is extrinsic to the game.

Would you believe me if I told you I am a better player than Babe Ruth because I have transcended hitting? Then why believe some light-hitting guru when he claims that never budging from home plate is the same as a homerun, because you end up in the same place?

I believe the human praying field is the dynamic space between I and Thou, or let's say O ↔ •, on the one hand, and • ↔ •, on the other (vertical and horizontal, respectively).

Considering the first, if we are rightly oriented, our becoming takes place in God, or, to be precise, in the living space between I and the metacosmic I AM. And predictions are all well and good, but you can't know the outcome until you play the game. "Upsets" happen all the time in sports and in life, and they violate neither physics nor God. And they certainly make life more interesting. Or as someone (Chesterton?) said: I don't believe in miracles. I only rely on them.