Real Selves and Worthless Cultures

When you think about it, having no center equates to having no self, or at least not a stable one.

And now that I'm thinking about it, it must be the other way around: no self, no center -- the reason being that there can be no center in the cosmos in the absence of subject. If the world were wholly objective, there would obviously be no center anywhere, just a kind of complete dispersal with no interior coherence, no perspective, and nothing for the phenomena to "revolve around," so to speak.

But to say I AM is to testify to Cosmic Central. Now, how can there be 7 billion cosmic centers on the planet, each insisting that I AM? It's a mystery, unless each of these is a local franchise of the one nonlocal I AM.

I wrote that without peeking ahead, but I see that Schuon agrees:

"Thus there is hope for the man who has no center, whatever the cause of his privation or infirmity might be; for there is a supra-human Center that is always available to us, and whose trace we bear within ourselves, given that we are made in the image of the Creator" (emphasis mine).

Think, for example, of how alcoholics and drug addicts are able to conquer their addictions by surrendering to this Higher Power. Come to think of it, this "is why Christ could say that what is impossible for man is always possible for God." That is to say, "however decentralized man may be, as soon as he sincerely turns to Heaven his relationship with God bestows a center on him" (ibid.).

Wʘʘ hʘʘ!

And -- to go back to what was said above about each of us being Cosmic Central -- "we are always at the center of the world when we address the Eternal" (ibid.). In the absence of this relationship to what infinitely transcends us, we are literally nobody on the road to nowhere.

It so happens that I'm reading another book, After the Natural Law: How the Classical Worldview Supports Our Modern Moral and Political Views, that discusses these same ideas from a slightly different angle; instead of pure metaphysics, it brings the discussion down a few notches to psychology and political science, or, you could say, the psychology of politics.

Not, mind you, the kind of vulgar psychology in which I toil. Rather, the real thing -- "ontological psychology," if you will: the psychology of reality and the reality of psychology. Metapsychology, I suppose: the psychology behind or above or beneath psychology.

Because it really all comes down to the question, What is a Person? Depending upon how you answer it, everything changes, especially politics, which is really just a form of group (or collective) psychology. As we always say, if you get your psychology (or anthropology) wrong, then your political philosophy will be destructive at best and genocidal at worst.

Think, for example, of the psychology of the Dred Scott decision, or Roe v. Wade, in which some human beings are irrationally stripped of their personhood for the convenience of some other group, e.g., slaveholders or feminists.

In chapter 4, The Classical Conception of the Person, Hill cooncurs that "No idea is more foundational to our deepest moral, political, and legal values than the concept of the soul, the self, or the human person."

That is, "Everything depends on who we are, how we are made, whether we are truly free and responsible, and whether there is a foundation for human dignity that transcends each individual's material talents and capacities."

Ultimately it comes down to whether the self is real or just an epiphenomenon, an illusion produced by brain activity that is in turn wholly material. In the latter view the self is to the brain as urine is to the kidneys, just a leftover byproduct with no value.

If the self is real (or unreal), how could we know it? In a way, the question answers itself, because how could a fundamentally unreal thing arrive at real truth?

"For the self to be real," writes Hill, "it must possess a unity of its own and persist through time." In other words -- consistent with what Schuon says about having a center -- the self must be a unity; it cannot be "hopelessly fragmented," but rather, a "centralized locus of identity, decision making and action that serves to bind the person to the whole" (Hill).

The idea of temporal unity is key. A mere object (say, a rock) has spatial unity -- we can see that it is one thing in space. But the self is "one thing in time," so to speak. It is constantly changing, and yet, is always itself. What is the nature and source of this unity? It must be something nonlocal that ties together all of the local experiences and events of one's life.

I would suggest that there is a kind of downward projection of God --> Soul --> Self --> Ego, each a narrower version of its predecessor. The ego is mainly the self's adaptation to the world, while the self is the soul's adaptation to a particular family, culture, and historical epoch.

To jump ahead a bit, how do we know that multiculturalism is such a crock? Because we may ascertain the "goodness" of this or that culture in terms of how much of one's soul may be expressed or potentiated in it.

In other words: what are the chances in this or that culture of actualizing one's real potential? Using this measurement, we could affirm that, say, Saudi Arabia, or the Palestinian Terrortories, or liberal academia, are approximately worthless.

Conversely, the America we once knew, and which has been systematically ravaged by the death cult of the left, was approximately priceless.

A Miscaste in the White House

So, there is the priestly/intellective caste and the royal/warrior caste. In India, I believe the idea was that society is like a human body, such that one needs a head (intelligence), a heart (courage), hands, feet, etc.

The hands and feet are the province of "the 'honorably average' man: he is essentially a hard worker, well-balanced, persevering; his center is love for work that is useful and well done, and carried out with God in mind; he aspires neither to transcendence nor glory -- although he aspires to be both pious and respectable..." (Schuon). Hard to say that without coming across as condescending, but admit it: you know exactly what he means.

And here is a big problem: liberals devote much of their energy to flattering this caste with the idea that mere labor is beneath them, such that everyone really belongs to the intellectual class. Therefore, everyone should go to college -- even though half the population by definition has an IQ below 100 and has no business in the intellectual world.

Solution? Reduce the standards of the university, such that it no longer requires any intellectual qualifications at all (excepting in those STEM fields that cannot be faked).

I remember a few months ago, an interview of Tavis Smiley (a liberal-certified black pretend-intellectual) by Michael Medved. Regarding black unemployment, Smiley said something to the effect that labor was fine for immigrants, but that "black folks are done with it" -- in other words, the fact that their ancestors had already been laborers somehow automatically qualified them for more intellectually demanding jobs.

The other problem is that in a "knowledge based economy" (or whatever else you want to call it), the population will be sorted as never before along the lines of native intelligence. Or, you could say that it is producing sharper lines than ever between castes.

And there is no way to turn hands and feet into brains -- unless you redefine the brain, as they do in all those fraudulent college disciplines that allow laborers to pretend they are intellectuals. This is why these types are almost always "activists," which is really a case of their lower caste slipping through.

This is also the source of the university/government industrial complex, in that government is of course the ideal place to force one's loony ideas on an unwilling populace -- like health insurance so fantastic that you go to prison if you refuse it. No one has to force quantum physics on anyone.

And once castes are mixed up in this manner, it is an invitation to the sociopath to jump into the mix. This is "the man who lacks a center... because he has two or even three centers at once: this is the type known as the pariah, arising from a 'mixture of castes'..." (ibid.). I suppose the difference today is that we create this type by, for example, putting laborers into the university and convincing them they are geniuses.

The result is a state-sponsored pariah -- like the one who currently occupies the White House. Think of it: he is a product of the university, and yet, is characterized by a breathtaking intellectual dishonesty and cynical amorality that once disqualified one for higher education (or would have been weeded out along the way).

I have to modify what I said above about STEM subjects, because even they are being infected by the new intellectual amorality: of "studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes." This means that two thirds of science is bullshit!

I haven't read the whole piece, but it concludes with this: "When cultural trends attempt to render science a sort of religion-less clericalism, scientists are apt to forget that they are made of the same crooked timber as the rest of humanity and will necessarily imperil the work that they do. The greatest friends of the Cult of Science are the worst enemies of science’s actual practice."

And this doesn't even get into the question of science being infiltrated by the centerless. "This new type -- who is unhinged -- is capable of 'everything and nothing'.... The pariah has neither center nor continuity; he is a void eager for sensations; his life is a disconnected series of arbitrary experiences" (Schuon).

Do not expect to find continuity or consistency in this type of moral monster (and note that this psychopath is Obama's top advisor on race relations!).

"The danger this type represents for society is evident," writes Schuon. For "no one [!] is willing to trust a leader who is at bottom a circus showman and one who is by his nature predisposed to crime."

Our political system is supposed to guard against this type, since the founders did not trust the power of the executive to emanate from his own center, so to speak. Rather, his center must be located exterior to himself, in the Constitution he has sworn to uphold.

How's that working out?

Infertile Eggheads & Hero Sumbitches

Schuon's discussion of the man with no center -- touched on in yesterday's post -- is in the context of an essay on the spiritual anthropology of India, AKA the caste system. We've discussed this subject in the past, but I forgot what I wrote about it, and it's easier to come up with something new than to search the hull of the arkive.

The whole notion of caste goes against the American principle of being born equal, but that hardly means equivalent, only that we are equal under the law, or that the law apples to everyone equally. In reality -- and this can only be understood and appreciated in a Judeo-Christianized culture -- everyone is a unique and unrepeatable person.

Nevertheless, there are patterns, for example, introverted vs. extroverted, thinking vs. feeling, daring vs. timid, etc. The subjective center of an extroverted person is not in the same place as the center of an introverted person. Neither one is intrinsically "wrong," but can become wrong if the person lacks consistency and tries to be something or someone he isn't.

For example, we all know pseudo-intellectuals who want to pretend they belong to the intellectual class but are more suited for manual labor.

"To be normal is to be homogeneous, and to be homogeneous is to have a center" (Schuon). This center, of course, cannot be static, but is always a dynamic, open system (both vertically and horizontally) that is never at equilibrium (equilibrium equating to death).

And "a normal man is one whose tendencies are, if not altogether uniform, at least concordant..." (ibid.). We shouldn't be completely at odds with ourself, like the intellectually dishonest liberal who can never be consistent -- or honest with himself -- and remain a liberal.

Again, the reason why our center is so important is that it relates to and tends toward the cosmic source of subjectivity, AKA Celestial Central. Note, for example, how the scattered self conceives of a scattered god, i.e., polytheism. Or, the materialized self conceives of a material god, i.e., pantheism or atheism.

Thus, "the tendency toward the Absolute, for which we are made, is difficult to realize in a heterogeneous soul -- a soul lacking a center, precisely..." It is the proverbial "house divided against itself" and "thus destined to collapse, eschatologically speaking" (ibid.).

This is all covered in pp. 216-218 of the Bʘʘk of the Same Name, albeit in annoying fashion, with the pneumaticon •••(•)••• standing for the scattered and decentered self.

Now, just because the center renders us homogeneous doesn't mean that the center is located in the same place for everyone. This is where the idea of caste comes in, and even if it isn't literally true, it certainly has explanatory power in my experience. For there are men of contemplation, men of action, men of labor, and men who are good for nothing, AKA social and cosmic outcastes.

The first is "the intellective, speculative, contemplative, sacerdotal type," who "tends toward wisdom or holiness." In fact, until rather late in the modern period the connection between the two -- wisdom and holiness -- was implicitly understood. The idea of the intellectual vulgarian who dominates contemporary academia would have been unthinkable.

Come to think of it, this is covered in a book someone sent me called The Political Theory of Christ: "As late as 1800, most Western intellectuals considered reason to be a form of divine revelation" and believed that "reason revealed the true nature of God." Only in the mid-to-late 19th century did the "revelation of a completely material world" become common currency.

Next comes "the warlike and royal type" who tend "towards glory and heroism" -- and not just in the material world, for there are spiritual heroes, AKA saints and martyrs who engage in spiritual combat.

And of course, just as the caste of intellectuals makes the pseudo-intellectual possible, this caste has its own counterfeit versions. In fact, most every hero of the left is a phony version of the real thing, from Caitlyn Jenner to Ted Kennedy to Margaret Sanger to Fidel Castro and on down.

To be continued...

Liberalism: An Infinitely Valuable Doctrine for Infinitely Worthless People

Speaking of man's deiformity, it is precisely this that gives man his value, his dignity, and his purpose, since without it he is just another animal.

There is secular humanism and there is Christian humanism, and the two could hardly be more opposite in their ground and their aims. For the secular humanist never stops trying to render the human animal "as useful as possible to a humanity as useless as possible" (Schuon).

That sounds like an insult, but it is quite literal. Take the question of abortion, which is founded on the principle that the human being is of no value whatsoever.

Indeed, the "right" to a dead child is considered higher than the child herself -- such that the abortion industry is of infinite value to a species which is of no value at all. So, why shouldn't the first amendment be repealed if it is deployed to question this orthodoxy? If a human being doesn't have the right to live, on what basis can she have the right to speak?

In order for leftism to "work," there must always be slaves and there must always be corpses. For example, what is Black Lives Matter but the systematic insistence that there be more deaths due to black criminality? What is the gay rights movement but the assurance that its beneficiaries live shorter and more miserable lives? What is the minimum wage movement but the desire for increased numbers of the unemployable to be dependent upon the state? And what is the right to healthcare -- or any other "positive" right -- but someone else's obligation to provide it, AKA involuntary servitude?

By way of contrast, Christian humanism begins with the principle of man's deiformity, which is to say that he is in the image and likeness of the Creator. It means that man qua man is utterly unique in the cosmos, in that he has intelligence, reason, self-consciousness, free will, and objectivity, all emanating from a nonlocal center which is the vertical prolongation of the Celestial Subject.

Thus, our proper cosmic orientation is toward the Celestial Subject who draws us into his gravitational field. Or not, for it is always possible to defy gravity and fall into another orbit. In fact, this is precisely what secular humanism does: it forgoes the divine orbit for the human one.

In so doing, it can look like we are elevating man, but we are really demoting him in a way that is solipsistic, narcissistic, and tautologous. In other words, we are enclosing man in a prison of ego, transforming a vertically open system into a closed one, which eventually leads to asphyxiation and/or starvation.

Secular humanism is the extinguishing of any and all possible meaning, since any meaning must derive from our converging upon something that isn't human. Again, to merely converge upon man is to be trapped in an absurcular tautology, to be sophicated in the quacksand of tenure.

Which is why the Master was able to reduce Christian practice to two fundamental principles, i.e., 1) love God and 2) love the neighbor, the second dependent upon the first. Our center comes from the first, our periphery from the second (in that the latter must be a prolongation of the former).

Schuon talks about the man with no center, and there are millions of these decentered people walking around. Look at it this way: people need a center, and if it isn't in God, it will be in something else: sex, drugs, work, ego, politics, intellectualism, hatred, thrill-seeking (sensation), -- even in religion (for example, Islamists).

Schuon suggests that there are people incapable of finding their own center within and above, and the more you think about it, the more useful this theory appears to be. In other words, even if it isn't literally true, it certainly appears to describe a class -- or caste -- of humanoids who, as he puts it, have "no ideal other than more or less gross pleasure."

I used to associate with this type, being that I was a blue collar fellow for all of my 20s and into my early 30s. In fact, I didn't become a fully licensed pslackologist until age 35, so most of my life was spent out of orbit. However, never completely. Somehow, I never lost contact with Celestial Central, and it eventually drew me back in.

Failing that, there is only one course of action for the decentered: "not knowing how to control himself," he "has to be controlled by others, so that his great virtue will be submission and fidelity."

We're almost out of time here, but consider the fact that the Democratic party is rooted in this very principle, i.e., hordes of centerless people who are supposed to do as they are told by a handful of billionaires (the center) and activists (their prolongation).

Science and Jehovial Witticisms

Went to a library book sale over the weekend and picked up five books for a buck each, including this one called The Natural History of Creation: Biblical Evolutionism and the Return of Natural Theology. Nothing much in it will be unfamiliar to Raccoons, but there was one chapter, called A Scientific Interpretation of the Divine Nature, that at least gave me an idea for a brief post.

Can science tell us "what God is like?" I don't see why not. All truth emanates from and speaks to the One Truth, so there's no reason why science should be any different, so long as we don't try to reduce God to what can be expressed scientifically.

Rather, science can provide a "view of God," so to speak (just as it provides a view of matter, or life, or stars, or whatever else it looks at).

Scripture tells us that man is created in the image and likeness of God. Now, man is clearly the most astonishing fact in all of existence, so it makes sense that this most unique and unusual being -- man -- is said to mirror the Absolute Principle underneath the whole existentialada.

Now, what are some of the unique features that define this unusual creature, man?

There are many to choose from, including,

--Creativity

--Transcendence

--Self-consciousness

--Free will

--Love

--Intersubjectivity

--Reason

--Truth/Knowledge

--Personhood

I would add that although we cannot know them in their fullest sense, we can certainly intuit timelessness, infinitude, and absoluteness, or in other words, touch the divine qualities of nonlocality, omnipresence, omniscience.

What are the chances? I mean, what are the odds of a randomly evolved being just happening to develop one of these divine traits, let alone all of them?

Indeed, it seems to me that they must come as a package deal, such that we can't have one without the others.

For example, truth is inconceivable in the absence of freedom, and vice versa (i.e., freedom without truth is just another name for meaninglessness, or absurdity, or being lost in the cosmos).

Likewise, knowledge is a priori transcendent, as is disinterested love, or reason, or freedom, and I don't see how we can ever get off the genetic arbitrary goround in the absence of an intersubjectivity that allows us to understand and communicate inner and outer reality.

It seems to me that it must all come down to the Trinitarian nature of God. For if God were... mono- or duo-tarian, then man -- and the cosmos -- would appear much different than they do.

For example, if God is a radical monad, there is no one to love, nothing to know, no one to give back to, etc. You know the old gag:

But it was not good that this Godhead, the Most High, should be allone... Indeed, this old ombody's so philled with jehoviality, can't He create anamour?

Yes!

In fact, he can't stop (creating, loving, knowing, etc.).

I Am the True Wine

Picking up right where we left off yesterday -- with Eckhart -- the Meistero claims that "Nowhere does God dwell more properly than in his temple, the intellect..." (in McGinn). By which of course he doesn't mean the mind, or ego, or consciousness, or any of that.

Rather, he means what Schuon means by the term, which is to say, a "mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light."

The intellect is both the mirror and the light it reflects, and simply cannot be a purely natural phenomenon. It is not God, but then again it isn't not-God, since it is a Divine Spark -- similar to how daylight on earth isn't the sun, and yet, it isn't not the sun. Rather, it's nothing other than the sun, only radiated and dispersed to the cosmic periphery.

Let's face it, without the intellect, we couldn't even know about the existence of God, so it all has to start there in some form or fashion, no matter how watered down or distorted. It is what reduces the mayaplicity of the world to unity, whether scientific or religious:

"The Intellect ‘is divine,’ first because it is a knower -- or because it is not a non-knower -- and secondly because it reduces all phenomena to their Principle; because it sees the Cause in every effect, and thus surmounts, at a certain level, the vertiginous and devouring multiplicity of the phenomenal world" (ibid.).

The intellect is the key to metaphysical understanding and certitude: our reason "perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whilst Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical -- and proceeds by intuition. Intellection is concrete in relation to rational abstractions, and abstract in relation to the divine Concreteness" (ibid.).

When we talk about the Incarnation of the Word, I think this is more the Word we're talking about, i.e., Intellect vs. mere reason, the latter being a small subset of the former. Thus, Christ is the "cosmic intellect," not just some bubbleheaded Einstein writ large.

McGinn: "the essence of all Eckhart's preaching can be reduced to understanding that the intellect" is "something that has no existence apart from its inherence in the Word..."

Only like can know like; which is why "I say to you in everlasting truth that if you are unlike this Truth of which we want to speak, you cannot understand me" (Eckart). Again: the intellect can only know God because it is already of God, knowing following in the tracks of being.

The intellect, you could say, is timeless. The will, however, is intrinsically temporal, in that it "takes time" to do anything, whereas understanding occurs in a flash. Intellect and will are truth and way, respectively, and "there is no Truth that does not have its prolongation in the Way," just as "there is no intelligence that does not have its prolongation in the will..." (Schuon).

Jesus being the perfect concordance of the two -- Truth and Way, intelligence and will -- his Truth is his Way, and vice versa. Indeed, he even says so: "I am the way, the truth, and the life," not to mention, "I am the light of the world." And while we're at it, we might as well throw in the true vine, i.e., the one with its roots aloft and wine down below.

About the Way to this realization, "every human being must, out of love of God, strive to 'be what he is'" and "to disengage himself from the artificial superstructures that disfigure him..." (Schuon). As they say, no one is obligated to participate in the infrahuman pathologies of the world, at least if your wood beleaf.

Rather, our task is "to become once again a tree whose root is made of liberating certitude and whose crown is made of beatific serenity" (ibid.).

It could also be said: we face the supra-personal Divinity as pure Intellect; the personal God we face as a human being; and the God-man... we face as a child. Now while on the one hand these three relationships are separate, on the other hand they cannot be exclusively distinct. --Schuon

Things That Cannot Not Be

Continuing with the keys to the damn world enigma, AKA "the principles that determine everything else" (Schuon). These principles equate to metaphysics, precisely, which you could say consists of the laws that Cannot Not Be given the Way Things Are.

For example, Darwinism pretends to be a kind of ultimate law of biology. But in order to be a law at all, it requires a very specific kind of cosmos. A universe that will support life is so rare, that Darwinism will almost never even come up. Therefore, Darwinism cannot be the general law of biology.

Whereas science moves in the direction of facts to laws to principles, metaphysics moves in the opposite direction, beginning with the principles that illuminate everything -- and I do mean everything -- else.

An example of a starting principle that cannot not be is that the world is intelligible to intelligence. However, this is already a bifurcation of a deeper principle, which is to say that reality is composed of a Truth which reveals itself on one side as knowledge and on the other as knower.

Any alternative to what I just said is impossible -- i.e., incoherent, self-refuting, absurd, tenured, etc.

With metaphysics we "touch God" in a way, because this is not a human -- or at least merely human -- knowledge. Since it is knowledge that must be, it is knowledge that will always be, and is therefore timeless and transcendent. It will never be out of date. It is not derived from reason, but rather, "made of truth," so to speak. It is the substance of truth, hence its intrinsic certainty. It is why Jesus can confidently say "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (not to reduce his words to mere metaphysics, because in his unique case he is the Truth he is speaking).

"The foundation of metaphysical certitude is the coincidence between truth and our being; a coincidence that no ratiocination could invalidate." Thus, "things deriving from the Absolute become clear by their participation in the Absolute, hence by a 'superabundance of light' -- according to Saint Thomas -- which amounts to saying that they are proven by themselves."

That sounds like a tautology -- "proven by themselves" -- but it isn't. Imagine, for example (speaking of an abundance of Light), the Transfiguration of Jesus. It is followed immediately by Peter's recognition of Who This Really Is. Not only is it its own proof, but the proof is beyond the capacity of the apostles to fully assimilate: again, it is a superabundance of Light. So yes, you can have "too much proof," in that it overwhelms the (lower case r) reason.

Must be what happened to the OJ jury. Not to mention the FBI investigation of Hillary.

In any event, "universal truths draw their evidence not from our contingent thought, but from our transpersonal being, which constitutes the substance of our spirit and guarantees the adequacy of intellection" (Schuon).

Now, metaphysics is not God; rather, it is a kind of ladder to God. Or, it is the ladder God provides in order for the intellect to climb up to him. However, there are both ascending and descending energies along this ladder, just as old Jacob said upon his awakening.

Along these lines, Schuon is as helpful as ever:

"Metaphysics has as it were two great dimensions, the one 'ascending' and dealing with universal principles and the distinction between the Real and the illusory, and the other 'descending' and dealing on the contrary with the divine life in creaturely situations, and thus with the fundamental and secret 'divinity' of beings and of things..."

Whereas the first is more sober and static -- for it is Reason -- "the second is mysterious and paradoxical, seeming at certain points to contradict the first, or again, it is like a wine with which the Universe becomes intoxicated."

The first is like the ascent of Reason up the mountain of Spirit, while the second is the descent of Spirit down to the plains and valleys and hollers of maya, or appearance, or phenomena. It's probably good to practice both, since they are complementary, i.e., intellection and mysticism.

Of all our cosmic peeps, I think Eckhart might have pulled off this complementarity most successfully -- you know, words and music. Let's see if I can pluck an example from that very book.

Here, from page 3: "What the philosophers have written about the natures and properties of things agree [with the Bible], especially since everything that is true, whether in being or in knowing, in scripture or in nature, proceeds from the one root of truth.... therefore, Moses, Christ, and the Philosopher [i.e., Aristotle] teach the same thing, differing only in the way they teach, namely as worthy of belief, as probable and likely, and as truth" (emphasis mine).

As we know, the cosmos is a tree, its roots aloft, its leaves and branches down below. The leaves of science are only alive because they are connected to limbs and trunk. So don't be the sap. All our middling relativities are related by way of the Absolute-Father, and are only related in and by Him. In other words, everything in the cosmos is more or less related, literally.

The Keys to the Damn World Enigma

In Schuon's To Have a Center there is a very short chapter -- just under four pages -- called Fundamental Keys. Since I don't have much time this morning, let's see how quickly we can review these underlying principles of the whole existentialada, and transform ourselves into quasi-omniscient bobnoxious gnosis-alls.

It reminds me how Ray Charles could size up a woman merely by holding her wrist in his hand. Someone asked him, "Ray, how can holding a woman's wrist tell you everything about a woman?," to which he responded, "I didn't say it tells me everything about her. It tells me everything I need to know about her."

So, perhaps these fundamental keys tell us everything we need to know about the cosmos.

He begins with the three modes of the spiritual life: meditation, concentration, and prayer. You might say that these are the means through which we gently place our fingers around the delicate wrist of the cosmos.

For Schuon, meditation is "an activity of the intelligence in view of understanding universal truths," whereas concentration "is an activity of the will in view of assimilating these truths or realities existentially, as it were."

So the first relates to intelligence and understanding, while the second relates to will and assimilation; to the extent that we know truth, then we want to be in conformity with it. Truth without will is powerless, while will without truth is blind (and therefore not free).

The third mode (prayer) "is an activity of the soul with respect to God." Looked at a certain way, one could even say that the soul itself is a prayer, in that it is always grounded in and oriented to its source. Conscious prayer only makes the relation explicit.

Back to the first mode, which revolves around intelligence. What is intelligence, really? Its "first function" must be "to distinguish between the Absolute and the Relative."

Which only means that if you attend the typical university steeped in postmodern relativism, it is overwhelmingly likely that the end result will be a systematic undermining of the first function of intelligence! In short, you won't just be unintelligent, but cosmically stupid. Is it any wonder that this -- the illiberal, totolerantarian multiversity -- is the great source of Bernie Sanders' support?

In addition (and related) to the distinction between absolute and relative, intelligence ought to be able to distinguish between reality and appearance, the necessary and contingent, the eternal and temporal, essence and existence, or more generally, the vertical and horizontal. Someone trying to unpack this post in a horizontal mode will get øwhere.

For Schuon this principle applies even -- or perhaps especially -- to God. In other words, there is in God -- or better, our perception of God -- the absolute and relative, the universal and particular, the eternal and temporal.

All religions recognize this distinction in some manner, but don't generally include it in the public program, since most people either won't understand it or will misunderstand it. Look at the trouble Eckhart got into for talking about it!

This distinction ultimately comes down to apophatic and cataphatic modes of knowing (or approaching) God; the first goes to the Beyond-Being of God, while the second goes to his Being. Note in this context that the unKnowing of apophaticism is considered a higher and more blessed form of knowledge than any mere cataphatic knowing. Orthoparadox alert!

In Vedanta there is Nirguna Brahman (God without characteristics) and Saguna Brahman (with characteristics). In Christianity there is the ontological Trinity (what goes on "inside" God) and the economic Trinity (which includes its activity in the world).

I think of it as analogous to God having a "dark side" (like the dark side of the moon). Whatever of God is "visible" to us must only be the appearance of an infinitely greater reality that is unknown to us.

And that is all we have time for this morning. We'll forge another key tomorrow, or at least try to pick the lock on heaven's door.

Vote Lovertarian

Just flipping through Love Alone is Credible and I see this interesting observation: only with Jesus' own "abandonment by God" (on Good Friday) and subsequent descent into hell (on Holy Saturday) does "deliberate atheism" become "possible for the very first time." This is because "without a genuine concept of God, there could be no true atheism."

This implies that Jesus is not only the world's first atheist, but by far the most thoroughly committed. After all, he is willing to forego God to the depths of hell, as far and as long as it takes to redeem fallen man -- whose very fallenness revolves around his alienation from God.

This is a point Balthasar emphasizes again and again, not just here, but in many of his works. There is a logic to the naked descent into hell, without which the Incarnation isn't complete. The circle of trinitarian love must expand all the way down and out, into the realm of its very negation.

Just as Light must penetrate the farthest reaches of darkness, Love must conquer hate, Life overcome death, and Truth sound the abyss of lies, "God, in the freedom of his love, makes the decision to descend kenotically all the way into the forsakenness of the world" -- a forsakenness that equates to a kind of auto-abandonment by God, of God, and in God.

People don't give it enough credit for being one of the more radical ideas imaginable.

"[T]he Spirit of Love cannot teach the Cross to the world in any other way than by disclosing the full depths of the guilt the world bears, a guilt that comes to light on the Cross, and is the only thing that makes the Cross intelligible."

I suppose what makes it intelligible is our guilt and God's love, the latter being sufficient to "cover" the former. We can't know just how guilty we are until we appreciate the death and God-forsakenness of the Cross. Nor without it can we begin to understand that from which we have been spared.

Again: wild idea.

We cannot leap over our own shadow (of guilt). Only God can do that. That we may be grafted onto this perfect circle is wilder still.

Yes, but at what price?

"Love desires no recompense other than to be loved in return; and thus God desires nothing in return for his love for us other than our love."

Love Alone is Credible. Incredible! Nothing short of it has sufficient explanatory power:

"Only a philosophy of freedom and love can account for our existence..."

This means that a true Christian must always be a lib- & lovertarian.

We've spoken before of how mere consciousness, or intelligence, or big brains, are insufficient to account for what is most remarkable about man -- that we are irreducibly intersubjectively open systems through which we find ourselves by giving ourselves away:

"One's consciousness, one's self-possession and possession of being, can grow only and precisely to the extent that one breaks out of being in and for oneself in the act of communication, in exchange, and in human and cosmic sympatheia."

This "circularity cannot be eliminated," for "it was conceived and set in motion by God alone..."

A footnote speaks of how, even in our bloodless and demythologized secular world, we can still perceive "the sheltering gaze that love casts upon being and essence," for example, revealing "the true nature of spousal love and the genuine love of children in the hearth of the triune fire of the family," not to mention "genuine friendship, and genuine love of country..."

Love does not come to man 'from the outside' because the human spirit is tied to the senses, but because love exists only between persons, a fact that every philosophy tends to forget. --Balthasar

Christianity: The Divine Comedy Club

In another book by Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, he suggests that "if God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, it's being wholly other."

On our end, he compares it to the ability to contemplate a great work of art. The person doing so "has to have a gift -- whether inborn or acquired through training -- to be able to perceive and assess its beauty, to distinguish it from mediocre art or kitsch." And there is a great deal of religious kitsch.

He then compares it to the mother-infant dyad (as discussed two posts back, only this is from a different book and makes a different point):

"After a mother has smiled at her child for many days and weeks, she finally receives her child's smile in response. She has awakened love in the heart of her child, and as the child awakens to love, it also awakens to knowledge: the initially empty-sense impressions gather meaningfully around the core of the Thou."

This is interesting, because it definitively links love and knowledge, and is our first hint that these transcendentals are unified at a higher level. I believe MotT talks about how love synthesizes while hatred disperses.

However, on a purely horizontal level it seems to me that hate unifies, which is why so many people -- especially on the left -- are addicted to it. For chronic haters, the only thing that gives them a sense of interior unity is the hated object (think too of the Islamic world, which is mainly unified by its Jew hatred).

Now, "God interprets himself to man as love in the same way [as the mother]: he radiates love, which kindles the light of love in the heart of man, and it is precisely this light that allows man to perceive this, the absolute Love." Remember the first time you smiled back to God? It seems to me that the spiritual life is a matter of amplifying this transpersonal resonance.

What did Eckhart say? Do you want to know what goes on in the core of the Trinity? I will tell you. In the core of the Trinity, the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.

In this space, "the primal foundation of being smiles at us as a mother and as a father." A "seed of love lies dormant within us as the image of God." However, "just as no child can be awakened to love without being loved, so too no human heart can come to an understanding of God without the free gift of his grace -- in the image of his Son."

I suppose this is why it is so important to reflect Christian love horizontally -- i.e., to love the neighbor, not just because it helps us, but because it helps others to experience God via the neighbor who is us.

The Christian Word can never be understood a as a mono-logue (like the Koran), but can only be experienced as dia-logoue. Therefore, "the book 'about' him must concern the transaction between him and the man he has encountered, addressed and redeemed in love."

That being the case, God must sometimes find himself asking, Is this thing on?

Oh, Grow Up

Not sure if this post goes anywhere. I'm still courageously laboring under this man flu. Nevertheless, let's continue with Balthasar's little sketch of human psycho-spiritual development.

It seems to me that Freud's idea of the latency period -- between four or five and puberty -- still holds water, in that after the turbulence of baby- and toddlerhood, the psychic tensions are diminished for a while -- or at least should be. For me, that period of time was magical.

My son is in the middle of it -- he's 10 -- and it seems like heaven on earth: "Nature and spirit are together in harmony." You got your buddies, you got sports, you're independent enough that you can run off by yourself to the park... What's not to like?

Sure, he hates school, but we don't put any pressure on him about that. I figure I don't remember anything from the fifth grade, so why should he? (And yet he gets good grades -- not to mention somehow winning the Person of Faith award every year. That surpasses even Bertie Wooster winning the prize for Scripture Knowledge while at Malvern House.)

But.

I think I see the shadow of a big But approaching in the distance. I don't like big Buts.

"Puberty brings a first questioning of this harmony. For the first time, the maturing person realizes his uniqueness as a person and thus experiences a loneliness hitherto unknown."

First of all, is this true? I never thought about it in exactly those terms, but it seems to be the case. I remember an intense longing, but I didn't really have any way to understand it. It was like, all of a sudden you are inhabited by a kind if psychic twin; it's not just you anymore, but this other being. We know ourselves "to be raised above the purely material," but what are we supposed to do about it?

So in that regard, the pattern is exactly like infancy, in which we are initially strangers to ourselves and only gradually individuate and find our center. In puberty it begins "with the discovery of [our] uniqueness, an as yet undefined dreamlike horizon of a meaningful whole that would correspond to [our] personhood..."

This certainly goes to Genesis, when Adam realizes he is alone and God furnishes a mate. That would have been nice.

But for us, "the first experiences of love" don't generally end well: "the thrilling side of the experience will at first cover up the contradiction that will, however, show all the more glaringly in the disillusionments that follow."

I remember that.

This is intriguing: "The disillusioned one feels himself betrayed not only by his partner but, on a deeper level, by his own nature."

In short, we confront the paradox that we want to "inscribe something permanent onto the surface of transitory material" (ibid.). This is obviously a spiritual longing, even the quintessence of it -- i.e., to infuse the finite with infinitude.

More generally, "Man wants to create something permanent, something above time, to make a definitive statement that would be the expression of his personal uniqueness."

Agreed. The problem is, on the one hand, if you confuse this with salvation; or, on the other, replace permanence with something less, e.g., fame or celebrity. I say, if you're not somehow dialoguing with eternity, you're just wrong. Nothing short of the timeless is really worth our time.

If Jesus is our archetypal man, perhaps we can learn a thing or two from his example: his mission "is not about detaching oneself from the transitory things in order to flee into some real or supposed eternity, but, conversely, about sowing the seed of eternity into the field of the world and letting the Kingdom of God spring up in this field."

(All quotes from Life Out of Death.)

And the Weird Became Flesh

Just a short post, because I have a cold...

As you know, I regard the neurologically immature human infant as the hinge of pneumacosmic evolution. Without the invention of the helpless human baby, there would have been no way to exit mere animality. Rather, we would be immersed in the senses and engulfed in the world, just like the other beasts.

For the longest time, I encountered no other writer who placed infancy in this cosmic context. So imagine my surprise when I found that Balthasar and Ratzinger -- maybe the two greatest theologians of the 20th century -- did the same.

For example, in this beautiful passage from Life Out of Death, Balthasar writes of how

The little child opens wide eyes at the world. What he sees -- forms, colors, sounds... -- he does not comprehend. The phenomena are neither familiar nor strange to him because he cannot yet apply them to himself. His self is not yet disclosed to him; whatever consciousness he possesses lies halfway between subject and object.

Now this is the true miracle among all these miracles of the beginning [by which I think he means that any kind of radical genesis is a miracle]: that one day the mother's smile is recognized by the child as a sign of his acceptance in the world and that the center of his own self is disclosed to him as he returns the smile. And because a You has found him, all the He that also surrounds him can be included in the relationship of familiarity (emphases mine, ellipsis in original).

The language is simple but the truth(s) it conveys could hardly be more profound. For this how God makes a human, one at a time, both today and in the past.

Mere Darwinism can't explain it, because a merely genetically complete Homo sapiens can never breach the walls of humanness in the absence of the Loving M(o)ther. So obviously, loving mothers and helpless babies had to co-arise; and given the time and energy it takes to care for a helpless infant, the father had to be there too.

Thus we have the image of concentric circles, with the baby at the center, surrounded by the mother, and with the father's protective arms encircling them. And of course, it couldn't have been accomplished without culture either, so you can add another circle. And there is no culture without cult, but that's getting a little far afield for our present purposes. Let's get back to the quote.

At first, the baby doesn't comprehend the world into which he has been thrown -- not just the exterior world, but the interior world which registers it. It is very much as if the world is all periphery and no center. Things just happen, with no continuity or point of reference. You might say that we "suffer" the world-sensations in a purely passive way. It's non-stop catastrophic novelty (which I think goes to grown-ups who retain an element of neophobia).

"Whatever consciousness he possesses lies halfway between subject and object." He's not yet a self, nor is there a stable or fully formed recognition of the other, so it's a strange world indeed. You would probably have to take LSD to simulate the experience of such radical novelty. No wonder babies cry!

I remember back in the day, reading a book on just this subject, i.e., taking LSD in order to regress to infancy and try to resolve one's issues. In the midst of a trip, people would draw their infanitle experiences. I wonder if I can find them online? Of course.

Ah. Here is birth:

Here's someone who seems to have had a bummer of a prenatal ride:

Anyway, the trippiest part of it all is how there is no I without a You. It's full of delightful orthoparadox, because the other You is really her own I, so becoming human is really an intimate mater of seeing things I to I. In the absence of that experience, we will remain at the periphery of ourselves, -- and of the world -- constantly persecuted by malevolent, unmetabolized experience.

In a certain way, human development -- i.e., individuation -- is always an ongrowing centration; not in the sense of being self-centered, because if things proceed the way they are supposed to, then the deepening of the self leads to a deepening of everything else, including one's ability to compassionately identify with others. The grandiose and brittle self-centeredness of an Obama would represent the pneumagraphic negative of what is supposed to happen in development.

Now, all of this has the most urgent religious connotations, because this whole situation reveals something essential about how God rolls. Yes, we are the image-and-likeness of God. But God is not a static thing!

Rather -- just for starters -- in God, the Father ceaselessly begets the Son, or gives birth to the Word. Thus, it ultimately explains how "finding God" and "being found by God" are the same thing (like finding mother and discovering oneself in the bargain).

In any event, the extremely weird situation revolving around the premature, neurologically incomplete and helpless baby turns out to be the only way I can think of to create a being in the image and likeness of an ec-centric Creator who is always lovingly giving away his own center.

The Cosmic Baby, blissfully floating before the fleeting flickering universe, stork naked in brahma daynight, worshiping in oneder in a weecosmic womb with a pew...:

The Vertical Church of the Live Grenade

Speaking of wounded Gods, I was thinking the other day of how mankind's blows to Jesus are like the last word in... jewjitsu, in that they ultimately miss him and instead redound upon the assailant. Ouch!

Actually, Balthasar says something similar in Heart of the World... which I can't find at the moment, but I see that there's a chapter called A Wound has Blossomed, so maybe this is just a roundabout way of getting there.

Ah. I see that it has a kind of double meaning. We wound Jesus out of the most wounded parts of our depraved selves, and somehow this backfires... in a good way: "Men wounded your Heart; water and blood flowed out. Men drank and became healthy; they washed themselves and became pure."

This goes even -- or perhaps especially -- for the man who murdered love. Which is all of us.

"Just as the first creation arose ever anew out of sheer nothingness, so, too, this second world... will have its sole origin in this wound, which is never to close again."

It's as if the church -- which is to say, the body of Christ -- is One Giant Wound.

In the margin, I wrote a note to myself: "He is the live grenade and the one who dives on it."

I just picked up Prayer, and there is this: the "'opening' to heaven which he is, is like a gaping rent going right through humanity, and the rent is the Church."

Which is sort of what I was driving at on page 252, where it says that the rend is now redeemable on your mirromortal garment.

If it makes no sense, don't worry, it's still perfect nonsense, for "it is as if God is not particularly interested in our attaining any kind of systematic grasp of his revelation."

Indeed, if we could completely comprehend it, it would be closer to Islam or Buddhism than to the Live Grenade (Islam explodes only dead ones).

By the way, God only supplies the grenade. We still have to pull the ring.

Referring back to what Balthasar says about God not being interested in a s. grasp of his r., another book of his helped motivate me to get back to blogging.

Recall that I was a tad frustrated over being unable to assemble it all into a Grand Synthesis, but think of the example of Jesus. Not only was there no Grand Synthesis, he didn't leave a single written word. Rather, he had the absolute faith to leave it to the Holy Spirit to take care of that. He doesn't even bother to try to be his own theologian.

"As for us, we try, for as long as we can, to finish our finite works ourselves; Jesus does not need to interpret the infinite work that he has begun and also completed and offer it in bite-sized pieces to the world; he can leave this to the divine Spirit for a perpetual interpretation. This is the ultimate Christian serenity" (emphasis mine).

"The only time Jesus wrote, he wrote on drifting dust.... Christ himself did not want, nor was he able, to manage the entirety of his work and suffering on earth with all its immanent meaning, but rather, handed it over to into the invisible hands of the Father."

So now I serenely type away and let God sort it out. To the extent that I have a mission -- even if just for myself -- submission must be prior to transmission. It's as if we can't give ourselves slack, but rather, can only surrender to it. And some disassembly is required, which is where the live grenade comes in.

Go ahead. Pull the ring. The wound only lasts forever.

"The Wounded God"

popped into my head this morning. Let's try to find out what why.

In the essay by Schuon cited yesterday, he defines Homo sapiens as the "being endowed with deiformity." As such, we are (at least in potential) a "total being" where all others are partial. We are capable of the imitation of Christ, as the old gag goes.

This being the case, the norms for humanness aren't given in the same way as for pigs, dogs, cows, and the rest of the animal kingdom. Their standards are "built in" and arrived at automatically.

As we've said before, no pig fails to become one (indeed, metaphysical evolutionists are helpless to explain why those damn fruit flies stubbornly continue to be fruit flies no matter how many thousands of generations in the laboratory). I suppose you could say that their telos is nonlocal but horizontal.

But man's archetype is nonlocal and vertical: it is for us to conform "to celestial norms," in a movement which in turn defines the "motion towards God" (ibid.).

As we've expressed it before, man is an eros shot directly into the heart of Celestial Central. In any event, "One cannot have homo sapiens without homo religiosus; there is no man without God" (ibid.).

Man qua man is in dialectic with the Divine Object, O (and with "human animality" below, if he chooses that route 666). And within this dialectic "the oneness of the object demands the totality of the subject" (ibid.), i.e., intellect, heart, and will.

Now, what this has to do with the Wound, I have no idea. Yet.

Let's stipulate that man is in dialectic with God. Nevertheless, man and God -- obviously -- are not equivalent terms. Rather, there is a senior partner who generates the whole isness. Thus we confront the orthoparadox that man "can only be himself through God" but "can never be God" (Balthasar). D'oh!

One reason why this is an orthoparadox is that we are called upon to (literally) do the impossible, precisely. I say "literally," for if we actually succeeded in "becoming God," this would be a kind of ultimate failure, since it would be delusional hubris. Nevertheless, we must try.

It very much reminds me of philosophy. The philo-sopher is a seeker of truth and lover of wisdom. The relationship is one of lover and beloved. The moment the relationship becomes one of possession, it's no longer philosophy. Usually it becomes some form of idolatry, whether, scientistic, religious, or religulous atheism.

So, theo-sophy would be a good name for the innerprize if it weren't tainted by other associations.

"No, I am not God; Yes, I need God as my beginning and my end" (Balthasar). But how are we supposed to imitate something or someone who is completely transcendent, immaterial, and unknowable?

"There was only one way out of this impasse, namely, that infinite, eternal Being should utter its own self in the form of a relative being" (ibid.).

So, man's "imitation of God" is predicated upon God's "imitation of man," so to speak.

Could this be where the wound gets in?

Yes, and in a variety of ways. For example, "anyone who encounters Christ is impelled either to worship him or to pick up stones with which to stone him" (ibid.). One way or another, somebody's gonna get hurt.

Indeed, at the ultimate extreme, "Christ's suffering, his God-forsakenness, his death and descent into hell is the revelation of a divine mystery, the language which God has chosen in order to render himself and his love intelligible to us" (ibid.).

Excuse me, but this is not the God I was expecting.

To be continued...

If You Don't Have a Question You Can't Have an Answer, and If You Don't Have a Wound You Can't be Healed

So, man is a perpetual question mark (?) before God.

What is he then in the absence of God? A question, yes, but a literally unanswerable one.

Then again, even posing -- or being -- the question implies something important, in that no other animal questions its existence. All other animals are "complete." They are answers without a question, while man is a question without answer.

There's a riddle for you: why would the most thoroughly complete animal be the most radically incomplete? The one must somehow imply the other in a roundabout way.

Perhaps the most compact way of saying it is that man is free; depending upon whether or not God exists, then freedom equates to the Good or Bad Infinity -- or, in existentialist terms, "being or nothingness." Each term is infinite, although it's the difference between a mountain peak and a swamp.

Schuon writes that "the purpose of our freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart."

It seems that there is no way to reduce this orthoparadoxical formulation to something more cutandry. We have a seed or spark at our center, "which, far from confining us, dilates us by offering us an inward space without limits and without shadows; and this center is in the last analysis the only one there is" (ibid.).

Ah. This would be the famous circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. In other words, God is the principle of centrality as such; without this principle, reality would be completely diffuse and disconnected, with no internal coherence.

Another way of saying it is that interior coherence is subjectivity as such. And all of this is related to the trinitarian structure of reality. It implies that man is, in a manner of speaking, God right here or over there. Both -- you and I -- are subjects of cosmic centrality, i.e., "in the image and likeness of Grand Central."

In a helpful (if we're lucky) essay called Overview of Anthropology, Schuon writes that human nature is distinguished from animal nature by virtue of being "made of centrality and totality, and hence objectivity..." Now he's thrown two more cosmic categories into the mix (totality and objectivity), but each must imply the other.

Centrality and totality are really two names for God -- or at least our (potential) conformity to him: they are "the capacity to conceive the Absolute" (i.e., God is every-where and every-thing).

And objectivity is "the capacity to step outside oneself," and therefore transcendence (although its opposite as well, i.e., sinking beneath oneself, not to mention various lateral iterations, i.e., false selves).

Without transcendence objectivity would be impossible, and without objectivity there is no intelligence deserving of the name.

Note that this objectivity takes three forms: there is 1) "objectivity of intelligence: the capacity to see things as they are in themselves..." 2) "objectivity of will, hence free will..."; and 3) "objectivity of sentiment," i.e., "the capacity for charity, disinterested love, compassion" (ibid.). Animals do not build hospitals.

As we know, man is composed of intellect, will, and sentiment; or truth, freedom, and virtue (or love). Animals are intelligent, but cannot be objective with it. It is doubtful that the most brainy animal can stand outside or above itself and regard itself as an object among objects.

And while animals obviously have will, it is not free; like animals, human beings can't help willing, but we can stand above (transcend) various options given by will and choose accordingly.

Finally, animals can love, after a fascion, but they have no way of knowing whether the loved object is worthy of it (e.g., Hitler's dog no doubt loved him).

I was just reading in MotT about how our various senses are like wounds. For example, thanks to a couple of holes in our heads, we are "pierced" by the light which allows us to see.

Now I'm thinking that the intellect, will, and sentiments alluded to above are equally wounds; and now that I think about it, they would have to be ontologically prior to our sensory wounds, i.e., sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing.

Let's start with the easiest: I mean, everyone knows that love is a wound, right? This is prefigured mythologically in the image of Cupid and his arrows.

And freedom is a wound, in the sense that it is "wide open." The existential anxiety produced by freedom is a consequence of the subjective experience of infinite choice; it's like having no skin, only on a transpersonal level (in the absence of God, our freedom is an unbound nightmare, a free fall into infinite space).

Finally, intelligence is definitely a wound, in the sense that, in order to know anything, we must first be open to the world. Think of the animal mind: it is not wounded in the same way ours is. They have the sensory wounds, but are untroubled by the higher injuries.

Much of this converges upon Jesus' most famous sermon -- you know, the one on the mount. In nearly every case, he talks about the necessity of the wound: blessed are the the poor in spirit, the meek, the persecuted, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, etc. Blessed are these gaping wounds, because without them we can't be healed.

Truth and Incarnotion

I say that -- "incarnotion" -- because I'm reading in Balthasar how Christian contemplation is really a kind of enfleshment of divine energies and ideas, thus, incarnotion. But mainly I say it because the title just popped into my head before I wrote the post, and it is merely up to me to write a post in conformity with the title so given.

In contemplation we are "an open ear to the ever-new word of God," wherein "God is speaking to this person and no other; to this beggar at the Temple gate..." "The whole glory" of this exchange -- and this is the key point -- is that "the very same personal encounter is meant to take place as in the Lord's earthly life."

I read somewhere words to the effect that it scarcely matters if Christ was incarnated in Nazareth or Bethlehem 2,000 years ago if he isn't incarnated in you. The Light must be onglowing. The Incarnation is always present tense. It is a perpetual possibility. Otherwise, what's the point?

It is the same vis-a-vis crucifixion and resurrection. I suppose it's really all a single movement of Incarnation-Crucifixion-Resurrection; which must in turn reflect an even deeper principle about the very nature of God. Which is what this weekend -- this Season -- is all about.

A "vast, living kingdom of heaven watches over transitory time..." For us this certainly includes the communion of saints and other worthies, i.e., those nonlocal operators standing by ready to assist us.

What do they see? Not bound by linear time or by various urgently trivial agendas, they "have an entirely different view of things; what seems important to us is utterly insignificant to them, and vice versa. What we are at pains to avoid can be the very thing which they see as significant, profitable and necessary..."

Oh great. Let this cup pass!

"Sorry. You don't know what's good for you."

Given that more tears are shed from answered than unanswered prayers, the corollary must be that more joy is spread from unanswered than answered ones. Not to say that the latter don't evoke joy, only to put things in their proper perspective.

Do people still try to "find themselves?" In the absence of God, there is simply no there there. "The man who concentrates on himself in the attempt to know himself better and thus, perhaps, to undertake some moral improvement, will certainly never encounter God..."

Conversely, "if he earnestly seeks God's will," then "he will -- incidentally, as it were -- realize and find himself (as far as he needs to)."

So, "finding oneself" is a byproduct of finding God -- which is really a tri-product of God finding us. In other words, the individual person is really a unique incarnotion, i.e., an Idea of God. Otherwise we'd all be the same, like animals and leftists.

Compare with the following quintessentially antichristic response to the definition of sin: Being out of alignment with my values.

This is helpful, for it explains why Obama regards political opponents as evil, for being out of alignment with his policies is a mortal sin.

Back to the God <--> Man complementarity which is brought to a cosmic pinnacle in the Incarnotion of the Godman.

If you think about it at all, you will be struck by the fact "that there should be something else apart from the 'all,' apart from the ocean of Being, a kind of 'non-all,' an 'almost nothing,' something that is not Being and yet somehow 'is,' something whose existence is not necessary but 'accidental'..."

What I'm driving at is this striking differentiation-in-unity and unity-in-differentation which reaches a climax in man, except that man can't bridge the chasm between the differentiation and the unity without effacing the one or the other, i.e., without ascending into a Vedantic nondualism or descending into a pantheistic monism.

I suppose only the incarnotion of Christ can bridge that abyss.

In conclusion, if man is (?) then God is (!). We get a sense of this truism whenever we experience a little spontaneous (?!).

The creature is a perpetual question addressed to God.... Fundamentally, God is the 'Other' in every possible way, and so he is the answer to the question which I am. --Balthasar

In My Womb

I think I'll try to do a short and concentrated post even when I don't have time to do a more sprawling and diffuse one. Like today.

As mentioned the other day, its seems that I feel better when I post than when I don't. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that communing with Ultimate Reality might be a "good way to start the day." Like planting good seed in the morning, or... I suppose it makes me feel like...

Petey, who was the fellow who said something about the point of life being to fire on all cylinders for something or other?

"I fancy the individual you have in mind, sir, is the philosopher Aristotle, who remarked that the Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue."

Yes, that's the one. I shall proceed to exercise the old faculties in c. with e. and v.

In any event, one way or another, this blogging business has become my primary Spiritual Practice, nor do I see it as something separate from prayer -- which is the subject and book under discussion. Mainly I pray for Light and the ability to reflect it, or pass it along to the Scattered Remnant.

Here, look at what Balthasar says: "The person who prays not only stands before truth and contemplates it objectively," but tries to live "in the truth" itself:

"Praying within the truth" means that we stand before "something pre-existing from time immemorial." This is what we are built for, as Aristotle says above: "Anything in us that runs counter to this is therefore merely a belated denial of what is our real truth, and hence nothing but a self-contradiction" (HvB).

Instead of horizontal intimacy with another person, it is vertical intimacy with the Metacosmic Person(s):

"Thus the union of the human being in grace and the Holy Spirit yields an ineffable fruit... in which it is impossible to say what comes from man and what comes from God. The 'fruits' of the Spirit in the receptive soul arise from the union of God's life with man's..."

These fruits, "once they have come to maturity, to our astonishment leave the 'womb'..."

Yes they do.

A dream. Last night. I'm explaining to someone that I'm trying to write a book. There's a huge wall before me -- like the Wall of Reality -- and I study parts of it with a monocle-like device, one part at a time. I explain that I'm trying somehow to assemble or synthesize the whole out of all the parts; or rather, waiting for the Spirit to show me how all the partial views through the monocle add up to the whole.

Am I wasting my timelessness?

"Intimacy with the Holy Spirit of truth... cancels out the spectator's uninvolved objectivity, with its external, critical attitude to the truth, and replaces it with an attitude which one can only describe as prayer."

So, is God telling me I don't have a prayer, or at least the right one?

"This prayer is total." It involves "our receiving and self-giving, our contemplating and our self-communication, in a single, undivided whole."

Reminds me of what our Unknown Friend says about how concentration without effort is putting unity into practice...

The Absolute Relative Absolute

Continuing with yesterday's discussion of faith as making a space for knowledge, Bion doesn't regard it (faith) as mere passive forgetting, but rather, "a positive act which restrains active memory and desire and provides a mental state which he represents by the term faith. It will allow him to approach the psychic reality that cannot be known but can 'be been'" (Grinberg, et al).

Analogously, as we've said before, God is not something known, but something undergone (or sophered). The only way to approach the I AM is via our own Be: I AM, therefore WE ARE. Balthasar: "To believe and to hear the word of God are one and the same thing."

"Bion uses the term faith, act of faith, and mystery in many of his papers to refer to a mental activity which operates in a non-sensuous dimension" (ibid.).

So, faith is the perfect way to know and understand nonsense; and God is the apex of the nonsense world (for spirit is immaterial). Without him we would be enclosed in an omniscient nightmare world of completely intelligible surfaces with no depth dimension, i.e., no mystery:

"For this voice from eternity whispers and breathes right through everything that exists in the world... and, without depriving the things of this world of their meaning and value, it lends them a bottomless dimension, exploding whatever is closed, relativizing whatever seems ultimate, revealing hidden depths in what seems simple..." (HvB, emphasis mine).

Woo hoo! A gnosis-all is never a know-it-all; nor is he a know-nothing, but rather, an unknow-everything.

Why are things This Way?

Evidently, the "divine plan" is "to lift the creature beyond himself and ennoble him..." (ibid.).

If that's not the plan, it's a hell of thing to happen in a random universe, i.e., a creature built to transcend itself. Why would such a being exist in a Darwinian world? Forget the order, information, and intelligence. How does the relentless transcendence get into the cosmos? How does perpetual being toward contaminate the pure being?

As far as I know, Christianity provides the only metaphysic that explains this mystery, for ultimate reality -- the Trinity -- is always and irreducibly a being-toward.

"In the Son, therefore, heaven is open to the world. He has opened the way from the one to the other and made exchange between the two possible..." (HvB). The Father "transcends" the Son, as the Son is Father-made-immanent. Immanence and transcendence are not a duality but a complementarity, the one always facing -- and nourishing -- the other.

Thus, "the One is accessible without our having to leave behind the many, the world..." The Son is "both ultimate and not ultimate. As God, he is absolute; and yet, as absolute, relative: as the Son who is a relationship proceeding from the Father and returning to him" (ibid.).

It's a Christian rac-koan: as Absolute, He is Relative; and as Relative, He is Absolute.

Furthermore, it's a single tripartite movement: "the sending of the Word of God (the Son) and the lending of the divine Spirit are only two phases of a single process in which divine truth and life are offered to man" (ibid.).

Moreover -- to return to the perfect nonsense -- "The withdrawal of the figure of the Son from sense-perception 'frees' the Spirit..." Only the Spirit "can cause the word of God to penetrate man, history, nature; only in the Spirit can man receive, contemplate and understand the word" (ibid.).

Mary's Yes to the Spirit "is the origin of all Christian contemplation"; like her, we must provide the ready -- which to say, empty -- womb in which to develop into fertile eggheads.

It is said that, 'Nature has a horror of emptiness.' The spiritual counter-truth here is that, 'the Spirit has a horror of fullness.' It is necessary to create a natural emptiness... in order for the spiritual to manifest itself. --Meditations on the Tarot

So, What Did You Learn From All that Education? O, Nothing

I just wanted to finish up my little review of the prolix pentalogy of Balthasar books I've recently read. As I mentioned in a comment, the resonant bits are a bit few and far between, but I shall endeavor to retrieve them anyway, because I have nothing better to do, and it seems that I feel better when I blog than when I don't.

Continuing with Prayer, Balthasar makes an exceedingly important point about faith, which is not analogous to credulousness or precritical thinking, but rather, "the ability to go beyond our own human intramundane and personal 'truth'...." It posits that 1) truth exists, and 2) that it is beyond us. That being the case, how else but in the reaching-beyond of faith can we contact it? Faith is the vertical bridge between finite and infinite.

Truly truly, it is a bridge to Owhere.

It's really not fundamentally different than, say, scientific faith. We've discussed this in the past, but scientific discoveries are not made through mere logic, otherwise reality would simply be an iteration of what we already know. Note too that the tiniest error at the beginning will be magnified exponentially the further you try to take it.

For example, Newtonian physics is quite accurate, accurate enough to get you through life. But if you try to use it to describe the entire cosmos, it's all wrong. At a certain point the anomalies become too obvious. Which is where Einstein stepped in in 1905. But even then, no matter how accurate quantum and relativity theories are, they cannot literally map reality without reminder. A model is not the thing itself. Except in climate science.

In any event, my point is that the scientist can't just extend an existing theory, but rather, has to wait in faith for reality to "speak" to him.

I might add that this is especially true of persons (and it turns out that reality is personal, as we'll get to later). There is no shortage of psychological theories, but not one of them actually describes, or can possibly describe, a real flesh and blood individual. In fact, by definition there can be no general theory of the individual, right?

This takes me way back to graduate school, and my discovery of the obscure psychoanalytic theorist W.R. Bion. He wrote of how, in the presence of a patient, the therapist must suspend memory, desire, and understanding, and enter a state of mind he called.... faith!

This attitude is so far from a medical model of the mind, that I immediately thought to myself, "how can you charge good money for systematically knowing nothing?" Frankly, I've never gotten past that question (imagine explaining it to an insurance adjuster). It's just a contingency of history that psychotherapy became medicalized -- for which reason it will always be full of pseudo-scientific quackery. Might as well try to medicalize religion (which is what Scientology effectively does).

For Bion, therapy "is a dynamic and lively interchange between two people who listen and talk to each other in a particular way, and not merely an intellectual and sophisticated adaptation between a 'psychoanalyst' and a 'patient'..." Therefore, "the therapist's fantasies of omnipotence, and this tendency to cling to theoretical a priori knowledge are the analyst's chief reactions in the face of something new and unknown that appears in every analytic session."

Think about that one: your job is to forget everything you think you learned in graduate school, and instead, simply be with this stranger, in the faith that Truth will eventually emerge in the space between you. The state of "not knowing" is not the same as mere ignorance; it is a state of active-passivity, or perhaps giving-receptiveness. It obviously combines male and female. It is allowing the space to become pregnant with truth, and eventually give birth to it. Let your will be done!

One reason you do this -- that is, "turn off" primary modes of knowing, is to "turn on" the more implicit ones. You might say that you have to disable the left brain in order to activate the right. Think of how one detects, say, anxiety.

Anxiety cannot be touched, or seen, or heard, or smelled. Or, let's just say "pain." How does one detect areas of psychic pain in an individual, especially when the individual is in denial about them? Often times the pain is "dispersed" in such a way that the therapist must be able to detect some small fragment of it and trace it back to a more primordial experience. Furthermore, the pain is dispersed in both space and time -- within the personality, and along the personal-historical timeline.

This is how I came up with the idea of O applied to God: I didn't just borrow it from Bion, rather, I stole it outright. For him, O is the unKnown reality between two persons in the analytic situation. I simply transposed it to the unKnown reality between two persons in the religious situation.

Faith is two things at once: an act and its object.... In more concrete terms, it is the grace which comes to us in God's self-giving and enables us to give ourselves to him in return. --HvB

Listening Past the Grooveyard

For some reason, I've been reading a lot of Balthasar lately. However, he is so windy and turgid that it just ended up adding to my ongoing bewilderment.

True, there are always scattered passages that speak directly to me, but these are punctuated by lengthy stretches in which he seems to be talking to himself. Thinking out loud. I want to say, "Okay, now review those last ten pages and condense it down to a sentence or two."

I remember Voegelin having the same problem. I suppose it's a Germanic thing. Schuon, who is the model of concision, spoke both German and French, but wrote all of his books in the latter, because he didn't think it possible to express them in German. If I recall correctly, he regarded French as the perfect vehicle for philosophical and metaphysical precision, whereas German was too... something. Maybe Twain was right: "Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp."

We're talking about five books, beginning with The Christian and Anxiety. Turns out it's not really about anxiety, but angst: according to the translator, "Although neither 'anxiety' nor 'anguish,' 'insecurity' nor 'fear' by itself fully captures the range of connotations of the German word, 'anxiety' and 'anguish' have generally been employed for direct translation of angst."

So, we need a term that combines anxiety, anguish, insecurity, fear, and angst. How about impending doom? Nameless dread? Lost in the cosmic bewilderness?

I shall now flip through the book and recall any highlighted passages that spoke to the Bob.

"Anxiety finds its ultimate meaning in the fact that the Word of God has taken it upon himself" (Yves Tourenne, from the foreword). So, Jesus doesn't just take on physical affliction but psychological affliction as well. The Word doesn't only become flesh; or flesh implies both soma and psyche. You could say that the Divine Slack became angst so that human angst might become slackful.

In any event, "God could not become man in any other way than by coming to know human fear and taking it upon himself" (HvB). But "human fear has been completely and definitively conquered by the Cross. Anxiety is one of the authorities, powers, and dominions over which the Lord triumphed on the Cross, and which he carried off captive and placed in chains" (ibid.).

So we got that going for us.

Next I read a book called Christian Meditation. The following makes perfect nonsense: "directions for meditating always begin by requiring us to create inner stillness and emptiness as a means of making room for what is to be received." In the form of pneumaticons, it means that we practice (o) and (---) in order to facilitate the descent of (↓).

When we "meditate on God," it is much more a case of God meditating on -- or in -- us: "We seem to be far from God, but he is near us. We need not work our way up to him.... God's plenitude is available without passing through antechambers. The way 'up to heaven' does not entail a long journey or descent 'down into the depths.'"

In short, God has already done the heavy lifting. Or rather, our ascending is just the back end of his descending, in one continuous spiraling movement.

A word from the Word is "like the point of a triangle on the ground that opens out upward into the infinite. His word is only the opportunity offered for ascending into this opening."

It reminds me of a diamond stylus in a record groove, which can generate as much as 35,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. In so doing, it -- so to speak -- throws out passages of timeless musical beauty. In the same way, via "borings vertically into the depths," the "vistas of God's word unfold to the meditating Christian..."

Next I read a book called Prayer, which covers a lot of the same ground as the above. Prayer is simply "a conversation between God and the soul..." It is a dialogue, for "there is no such thing as solitary speech," but rather, always an implicit Thou.

Thus, it seems that our listening is much more important than our speaking: "The essential thing is for us to hear God's word and discover from it how to respond to him.... God's word is the rope ladder thrown down to us so that we can climb up into the rescuing vessel."

This I like: "Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself." As such, no matter how much we know about ourselves, the unKnown -- or that known only by God -- is always greater.

This is one of the things that turned me from psychology to theology, metaphysics, and mysticism, in that the area described by psychology is so modest (and yet the field is so immodest in its claims).

The reason why the unknown always dwarfs the known is that our personal subject is ultimately rooted in the divine Subject. As we've said before, "He is, therefore I am" (or better, I AM, therefore we are). There is no other explanation. God "is in the 'I,' but he is also above it; since, as the absolute 'I,' he transcends it, he is in the human 'I' as its deepest ground, 'more inward to me than I am to myself.'"

And "scripture is not some systematic wisdom; it is an account of God's meeting with men" -- again, like the stylus in the groove. In contemplating it "we learn how to listen properly, and this listening is the original wellspring of all Christian life and prayer."