Mind-Matter Dualism and Incarnational Trialism

Come to think of it, we can't blame Descartes for everything. After all, there's the rest of the world. It has always been a trainwreck.

Furthermore, Descartes is hardly the first to commit the error of dualism. Rather, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, neoplatonism, and even Buddhism fall into the same cosmic heresy of dividing the world into naughty and nice, and then escaping into the nice.

Yes, but isn't this the whole point of religion? How is this different from the whole satan thingy?

There is no doubt that some forms of Christianity have and continue to fall into dualism, even though the whole Christian message is rooted in a metaphysic that is supposed to render this impossible. Rather, there is one creator, and everything he creates is good. To the extent that something fails to be good, then it is not the result of an evil co-creator or co-equal force of darkness -- as, for example, Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism.

I would suggest that it is a permanent human temptation to divide the world in this manner. In modern times it is most effectively practiced by the left, which cannot function without demonization, vilification, and calumny.

For example, one of the (admittedly many) reasons MSNBC has tanked so badly is that demonization works fine when someone else is in charge. When the left is in charge, who's left to demonize? Pizza parlors, bakers, imaginary rapists, nonexistent racists, dissenting tea partiers, etc.

As Ace wrote, "the left is now patrolling the already-won battlefield to find survivors and shoot them -- while forever casting itself as the trespassed-upon victim." Or as Iowahawk tweeted, "Don't compare yourself to a Selma marcher when you're unleashing the dogs and firehoses." Another tweetist reminds us of how "the civil rights movement really got going when Rosa Parks went door to door trying to find someone who wouldn't give her a ride." The left desperately searches for demons to account for the evils it unleashes.

I think it's fair to say that people truly long for a simplistic, dualistic world, because then it's so easy to recognize and eliminate the problem. But if the problem runs straight through the human heart, then it's not so easy. Then it's even possible for a negro to be racist, or a person with a vagina to be incompetent, or a sodomist to be a bully, or an immigrant to be a drain on the rest of us, or a man of tenure to be a retard!

Yesterday I saw a clip of Bill Maher going on about how all religions are stupid. Easy for him to say, since his religion of Pure Light by definition has only intelligent and virtuous people like himself.

Along these lines, I recently read a book called At the Heart of the Gospel, which is a kind of popular summary of Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, which in turn is -- in JP's view -- a summary of Christianity itself.

For at the heart of the gospel is what? A union of God and man, of spirit and flesh, of time and eternity -- as opposed to a division of these things. Not only is this is a radical notion, but it must be counter-intuitive, otherwise why would God have to go to all that trouble of making it known to us? And one reason why it is so radical is that it goes against our tendency to reach for a facile dualism.

At the heart of the gospel are actually two principles: Incarnation and Trinity, the latter of which counters the dualistic temptation from a different angle.

West starts with a passage from the Catechism: "The flesh is the hinge of salvation," and "We believe in the Word made flesh in order to redeem the flesh."

But there have always been misbelievers who split "body and soul in order to 'free' love from... the 'unflattering' and 'unholy' realities of bodiliness." Again, that is the easy way out (and a mirror of the other easy alternative into a soulless hedonism): the former is "angelism," the latter "animalism" (Descartes and his descendants are angelists).

But just as Jesus is God and man, we are human and animal, not one or the other. The task is not to repress or deny the animal, but rather, to elevate it; or better, to infuse it with the same "divine descent" that came into the flesh more generally. That descent goes all the way down.

Thus, in the words of Cardinal Newman (quoted by West), the object "is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God and have been put asunder by man." We need to re-integrate our dis-integration (or rather, recognize that "it is accomplished").

The "descent of God is intended to draw us into a movement of ascent" (Ratzinger, ibid). I find it useful to visualize this as a continuous spiral of (⇅), whereby man may participate in this trinitarian movement. The movement, of course, goes all the way down and all the way up -- to hell and back, you might say. We know it goes all the way to hell, because we have read and heard countless spiritual autobiographies of people who were reached in hell's kitchen and managed to turn their lives around.

We will get back to our main subject on Monday, but this is very much related to it, because "by fleeing the material world in search of the spirit, we actually embrace the essential tenet of materialism" (West).

In other words, one can be a materialist both by embracing or rejecting matter, i.e., by taking one side of the Cartesian dualism. In this way, the rejection only gives more force to its opposite tendency, otherwise those atheist activists would be out of business.

In short, "The Christian response to both materialism and spiritualism is the Incarnation," such that "there is no reaching the 'higher' without pondering the 'lower'"; or, "we reach the 'higher' precisely because" it "has descended into the 'lower'" (West). This is both the logic of the logos and the logos of logic.

And we can't accomplice this climb this without a body, "which has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world" the otherwise hidden mystery of God.

Abstractions, Nightmares, and the Frustrated Gods of the Left

While the old brain is warming up, let's review.

Yesterday we figured out that Descartes has been ruining everybody's lives and eating all our steak. But it's a free country and he can do whatever he wants. Or is it? Free, I mean?

That's one of the themes of Heart of the World, in that it is an inquiry into modern liberalism and its ugly twin, "liberation." (And he includes conservative liberalism in his critique, even though it is merely inadequate where left liberalism is frankly diabolical.)

For example, contemporary liberalism posits human freedom, but it is a radically disconnected freedom that isn't grounded in anything prior, nor is it rendered meaningful by having any telos. In short, it is utterly pointless, just another name for nihilism. Besides, on what basis can we say that freedom is even a good?

In the Christian view, we are first given our freedom; which means that we receive it before we act on it. Conversely, in the secular view, we just take it and act on it. But where did it come from? How did it get here?

This goes to yesterday's penultimate paragraph about how liberalism is founded upon a divided reality, with the false objectivity of bonehead scientism on one side, and the radical subjectivism and relativism of postmodernity on the other. For the former, freedom must be an illusion (since science by definition cannot account for it), while for the latter it reduces to either power or desire (or both in the case of leftist politics).

So, here's the heteroparadox -- or cosmic heresy -- at the heart of contemporary liberalism: "on the one hand, Descartes turns to the subject, making the human subject dominant in determining what is to count truly as an object, or as objective." Again, sounds harmless enough. Man is the measure of all things, and all that.

However, "in making the human subject dominant, he simultaneously eliminates what is distinctly subjective about the human subject." In other words, he turns the human subject itself into a kind of object, being that it corresponds with a reality conceived of as mechanical and mathematical. Or in other words, the subject is liberated only to be pulled right back down into the object; or, quality reduces to quantity, semantics to syntax, reality to appearances.

Remember Marshall McLuhan's famous crack about the medium being the message? Well, in this case the method is the message. That's right, the scientific method, which seems so free of content, is the message if it is detached from the real world of the human subject.

Come to think of it, Al Whitehead warned of the same thing in Science and the Modern World, and probably in Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought as well if I remember correctly. And in fact, the whole thrust of Schindler's argument leads in a process direction which for some reason he seems to find a bit uncomfortable, but we'll fix that. No worries.

Back to the Cartesian Split: it "involves at once a mechanizing of the meaning of objectivity and a setting aside of subjectivity as irrelevant, indeed as intrusive..."

So, what does this orphaned and unwanted subjectivity do? It obviously still exists, only now untethered to any comprehensive view of reality. I'll tell you what it does: it runs wild all over the place while flattering itself with the name "liberation." It ruins everybody's lives and eats all our steak.

I don't know about you, but back in college I learned such idiocies as "perception is reality" so you can't judge other lifestyles and people and cultures and stuff! This liberal lunacy is an inevitable consequence of a metaphysic that renders subjectivity completely unhinged from any objective reality.

People talk about the division between red and blue, or liberal and conservative, but think of the more primordial divide between the engineering or business departments and the gender studies or queer theory departments. That is an unbridgeable cosmic abyss, and it all goes back to the idea that the human subject is anything we want it to be, because it is not first received as gift, but rather, just this inexplicable thing we act on.

This goes to the deepest of depths, in that for the Christian, essence precedes existence, while for the modern liberal existence precedes essence. In other words, for the Christian, since we receive our being from elsewhere, we are who we damn well are before we act on our freedom. But contemporary liberals make themselves into what that are. In short, they become their own gods, since they give the form to their own existence.

But even here they are never consistent, since they never run out of excuses as to why they can't be who they want to be. They are gods, to be sure, but very frustrated gods. There is structural racism, or campus rape, or gender oppression, or birth control that isn't free, or "marriage inequality," or the "wage gap," or oppressive "religious freedom," etc. It's always something!

Some god. Some freedom. It is why the so-called freedom of the left always results in less freedom. It is why the denial of sexual reality leads directly to the Cake Police and the Pizza Thugs. The little gods need a big machine-god to force reality into a shape that pleases them.

I'm a little lazy this morning, so we'll just leave off with a summary quote by Schindler:

"Thus Descartes' vaunted claim of a method essentially neutral toward any content already and in principle favors an ontology which primitively separates subject and object and dichotomizes objectivity and subjectivity."

An airy abstraction at one end, an all too concrete nightmare at the other.

The Adversary's Solution to the Mind-Matter Conundrum: Divide and Conquer

I was out late last night, and now I'm tired. Therefore, this will not be a challenging post. I'm not up for any deep pondering. Maybe just some groundwork. Plus it will no doubt be more rambly than usual. I predict that it will struggle to get off the ground before running out of steam at the end. So maybe you should just skip it.

Last night someone asked me what this book is about -- Heart of the World, Center of the Church -- but I was pretty much stumped for an answer. It kind of blows my circuits as I'm reading, which seems to interfere with memory, and certainly synthesis. There's too much to wrap one's mind around, and if I can't grasp the whole, I have trouble retaining the parts.

So, I'm going to just revisit the parts I highlighted, and try to unscramble my egghead and put my humpty back together.

For me, the author doesn't really hit his stride until about midway through the book, with a chapter called Catholicism and the Liberal Model of the Academy in America. It goes to the more general question: of what should a Catholic education consist?

I would prefer to just say Christian education, but that might be part of the problem, because -- if Schindler is correct -- Protestantism already cedes so much ground to secularism at the outset, that it loses the battle before it has begun. In other words, certain Protestant assumptions entail secular liberal conclusions.

For example, should a "Christian" university try to be like any other university, only with a little religion sprinkled on top? Naturally it is easier in the liberal arts, where one can simply have a curriculum that revolves around the artistic treasures of western civilization instead of degrading us with the hideous gobshite of postmodernity.

But what about more generally? I look at my son's Catholic school, and sometimes wonder how it is supposed to be distinctively different from a secular school. In my mind, rather than having the religious dimension added on, his education should be infused with the Christian spirit. What would this look like, and how can we tell the difference? What does it mean to think as a Christian -- not so much the content, but the form?

"To have a Catholic university... it is necessary (also) to develop a Catholic mind." Simply learning about religion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for this transformation of the mind.

And when I say "trans-formation," it is very much as if the mind must be refashioned and re-formed by transcendental causes to which it must be open. If that fails to occur, then you haven't had a "Christian education," no matter how much theology, dogma, and scripture you have committed to memory.

"Is it meaningful to speak of a mind... internally Catholic in any discipline other than theology? What could 'internally Catholic' mean, for example, in philosophy, or in biology and physics, or in accounting and computer science?"

In short, if truth is universal, how could there be secular truth and Christian truth in the disciplines he mentions? I'll tell you how. In a minute.

But if you simply swallow these disciplines whole, without criticism (i.e., the secular approach to them), you're going to take in a whole lot of hidden assumptions with them. Then, once these assumptions are in place, they will actually interfere with a properly religious understanding. Like how a virus gets into your computer.

Very insidious, don't you know. Once this happens, to the extent that you want to continue being religious, then it will be as if religion needs to exist side by side with the other disciplines. Any possibility of Total Cosmic Unity will be lost, and you will live in a bifurcated, dualistic world in which you retain your faith in spite of what you learned in school, instead of because of it.

But -- and here I think is the key -- you actually assimilated this bifurcated world before you even began your journey. That's how they ensnare you! You think you're just learning content, when in reality you're assimilating a whole way of looking at things that is anti-religious (and, more to the point, anti-reality) to the core.

Liberalism -- and this is one of the points Jonah Goldberg drives home in Liberal Fascism -- "embodies above all the claim to neutrality" (and he's not talking about political liberalism per se, rather, the whole project of modernity). It presumes "to avoid any a priori assumption of content" which might "prejudice the (putative) pure openness of the methods."

This is what modern liberals are referring to when they accuse conservatives of being "anti-science." That is, we're the ones who supposedly approach reality with all this theological baggage, whereas they do so with a completely blank slate. They claim to accept truth where they find it, with no ideological, metaphysical, or philosophical commitments whatsoever.

The cosmos apparently went off the rails with Descartes. I personally have trouble blaming one guy for this mess, so let's just take him as the focal point of a more general trend. Descartes "strove to remove the ghostly residue of subjectivity from method and indeed to determine the form of method prior to its being conditioned by any content whatsoever."

Seems like a good idea. It's even rather seductive, isn't it? What could possibly go wrong? We'll just empty our heads of all assumptions and proceed in a purely rational manner: "We are committed in advance only to pure form and not at all to content."

Seems innocent enough, but do this and you have swallowed a whole cosmos -- an alternative cosmos. Or, one might say that you have stepped into a parallel universe, under the assumption that man has finally, after 100,000 years of wandering in the bewilderness, entered the Real World.

But remember, Descartes actually divides the world "in half" before he even starts. That is, if you begin by presupposing radically divided worlds of mind and matter, you shouldn't be surprised that this radical division will persist wherever you look and no matter how much your thinking evolves. Dude, you've rended the fabric of reality, such that there is no way to put Humpty back together, and no area rug big enough to sweep his broken fragments under it!

There is orthoparadox and there is paradox, and Descartes lands us in the latter, for in dividing reality, we end with a "false objectivity" mirrored by an arbitrary subjectivism. Or -- and this is what you'll get in a modern education -- scientism at one end and relativism at the other. Each of these is an intellectual tyranny -- for they destroy the soul's freedom -- and yet, are opposites.

I think I'll stop now, before things get too heavy for my brain to lift.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for God Between the Syntactical Trees and the Semantic Forest

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

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

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

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

I'm tempted to try....

Okay: "I live in a house."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Out of Two Universes Ends in Divorce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random Inspiration and Haphazard Creativity

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

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

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

Yes, Hollywood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll just leave off with the following quote:

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

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

Scripture: IT'S ALIVE!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Your Door to the Love Explosion!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time on Steroids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outta time and outta here...

Points of Reverence for Mapping God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is why the Raccoon calls them points of reverence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Think I Sort of Disagree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Purposeless-Driven Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More recent:

You Must Be Dreaming!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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