What Makes a Man?

 What makes a man, Mr. Schuon?

Intelligence, sentiment, will; or truth, virtue, freedom.

Ah, a limber mind, challenges met, obstacles overcome, doing the right thing -- and tears, for strong men also cry and have sentiments. 

A few posts back we wondered out loud whether in some sense and in a manner of speaking, anthropology might be theology, and vice versa? At the outset let us eliminate the idea that God is but a projection of human psychology, because that is not what we mean. At all. 

Which doesn't mean this sort of naive projection doesn't take place, because it does, all the time -- for example, by atheists who never tire of ridiculing and rejecting a deity of their own making. We, of course, also reject the imaginary god of the village atheist. 

Let us attach the wide angle lens to our cosmic camera and open the ƒ-stop to ∞. What do we see? First, we see that some kind of relation exists between man and "ultimate reality," irrespective of how we conceive the latter, or even if we have only the concept. 

It seems we can't help thinking about the ultimate principle, whether we do so implicitly or explicitly. For example, even materialism -- the crudest conceivable metaphysic -- posits matter as the ultimate principle, only ignoring how principles exist and how man can achieve knowledge of them. 

In fact, even a nihilist who pretends there is no ultimate reality ends up turning himself into ultimate reality, which reminds me of what Voegelin says in an essay called The Murder of God: "It does not suffice"

to replace the old world of God with a new world of man: the world of God itself must have been a world of man, and God a work of man which can therefore be destroyed if it prevents man from reigning over the order of being.

The new and improved Marxist-socialist man  

is not a man without religious illusions, but one who has taken God back into his being.... The new man is, like Nietzsche's superman, the man who has made himself God.

Nice work if you can get it, but

the attempt to create a superman is an attempt to murder man. Historically, the murder of God is not followed by the superman, but by the murder of man..., the homicide of the revolutionary practitioners (Voegelin). 

Now, what is ultimate reality? First, it is something that is distinct from all appearances, which introduces a kind of (humanly) unrelievable tension between the two. For example, the progress of science is always from appearances toward a deeper reality, or from multiplicity to unity.

However, from another angle, ultimate reality must include the principle of appearance as such, so must be "in" every appearance -- in the same way, for example, that the cause is in the effect, or how the principle of unity must be present in all numbers (each number being a multiple of one).

Any principle is something from which consequences follow, and God is the first principle from which everything ultimately flows. This doesn't mean we know God, only that we know that God -- the Principle -- must exist.

Now, man and God (or however you want to express this Tension) are ineluctably mixed up together in the cosmic caper we call existence. There is no culture without some version of the God Principle, so God is an unindicted co-conspirator in all human activity, emphasis on the spira -- and on the con -- as in "breathing together."

Not to say God is guilty of our mischief, for this would be analogous to holding the treasury department responsible for bank robberies. Nevertheless, the treasury department prints the money, as God projects being via his continually creative act. 

Nor do we deny natural evolution at the far end of the spectrum, only to say that human isness can in no way be reduced to monkey business. No, we are suspended between the nonlocal Principle and a local animal form, and that's just the way it is. If we were literally reducible to our genetic code, we could never know it; or, to know it is to have transcended it.

Which I suppose goes to the question of free will -- again, of challenges met, obstacles overcome, doing the right thing, etc. 

Now, some of our intellectual betters like to are compelled to say that free will is an illusion, while others willfully insist that the will to power is all there is, and that all philosophies and narratives are just masks for the exercise of power.

Oh, by the way, these thoughts have been provoked by an essay called Outlines of a Spiritual Anthropology, contained in the same book we were discussing yesterday, From the Divine to the Human. In discussing the absolute toppermost of the poppermost, Schuon says that the divine perfections contained in the Absolute are 

Knowledge, Love and Power, which evoke the human faculties of intelligence, sentiment and will.

Of course, these are not separate in God, only in us -- which is why a progressive idiot can say something as stupid as man being reducible to will and power, thereby tossing out intelligence and sentiment (and by implication, man). In reality, 

Will is not an end in itself: one cannot will except by virtue of either a knowledge or of a love. 

At least in a normal person. But eliminate truth and love, and the will to power is all that's left -- a naked will to achieve without a limber mind.

I don't always take the Bible literally, but I do take literally the axiom that man is in the image and likeness of the Principle, or better, the Creative Principle. 

Here again, this is where anthropology becomes theology and vice versa, because it is as if these two mirrors are held up to each other, so long as we stipulate that they are not on the same plane, which would reduce to pantheism, magic, nihilism, or some other deformation of being. If the Principle is Absolute, then we are the "reflected" or "relative" absolute. It's why we can even know absolute principles.

All "anthropology" depends on a "theology" in the sense that every science of man must prolong a science of God. 

This is at once self-evident but is worth emphasizing "in a world which, having forgotten the divine, no longer can know what is human."

Like God, man is made of spirit, only embodied spirit. In turn, the spirit "is made of knowledge and love -- or of intelligence and sentiment -- then of will, the latter necessarily drawing its inspiration from one or the other of these two faculties." 

Schuon relates the perspectives of intelligence-knowledge and sentiment-love to "the polarity of the masculine and feminine." Obviously the one hardly excludes the other, but speaking only for myself, it is a great relief that my wife isn't built like me. Schuon compares knowledge and love to light and heat respectively, and who wants to live in a warm but dark environment, or a bright and freezing one? 

Above we mentioned that the will is a function of knowledge or love, but we all know people in whom it is a function of hatred and ignorance. 

Here, will becomes willfulness, and is actually no longer free. I'm pretty sure Jesus has something like this in mind with various admonitions against hating in the wrong way. Sure, it's necessary to hate evil, but do make sure it's evil, and also make sure you're intelligent and humble enough to know the difference (and there is no intelligence without humility -- and a bit of self-awareness -- which amount to the same thing).

In fact, Schuon says that the content of our character "combines what we will and what we love," which is "the domain of virtues." This perspective places intelligence at the summit, whereas "the perspective of love, on the contrary, places love at the summit and views intelligence and will solely as functions in service of love."

I would say that if you naturally tend toward one, you probably need to work on the other. I love truth, and I guess that's a start, but you know what Paul says: 

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 

So, in my case, knowledge comes easily and naturally. What Paul just said? Not so naturally, but here's hoping it comes supernaturally, because I don't want to be hermetically sealed in my own Bobness, which is no achievement at all.

Suspended Between Uncertain Truth and Certain Untruth

While rummaging around for some metaphysical back-up for our vertical peregrinotions, I pulled out Schuon's From the Divine to the Human which, for me, expresses what Voegelin is trying to say about our ontological pickle -- the human predicament -- in a far more concise, essential, and experiential way. 

Schuon is an excellent sherpa for the vertical ascent because he never wastes your timelessness with half-baked speculation but gets straight to the point. He doesn't "think out loud" in wild and wooly way, like some attention-starved blogger. Rather, everything has already been thought through and therefore "edited" in the head before being reduced to writing.

It reminds me of how the Beatles recorded before and after 1967. Before, their producer George Martin would make them sit down and play actual compositions, which they could then tweak and sprinkle with a little Beatle fairy dust on top. 

But after '67 they would noodle around for hours hoping a serviceable composition would emerge, but then it might require literally hundreds of takes to perfect. I just read a book by their engineer who says the new way was tedious beyond belief.

Like reading a German philosopher.

First, let's give a big hand to this little footnote to an essay called Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity: "to know the nature of subjectivity is to know the structure of the world." 

Obviously he doesn't mean this in any Kantian sense, in which case to to know the nature of subjectivity is to know the nature of the subjectivity. The world -- whatever that is -- is unknown and unknowable outside our categories of knowing it. Being an idealist means you can truly know everything. Except reality.  

But if the purpose of intelligence isn't to know intelligible being, then to hell with it: knowledge is ignorance and ignorance is power. Schuon speaks of "the monstrous disproportion between the cleverness of reason"

and the falseness of its results; tons of intelligence are wasted to circumvent the essential while brilliantly proving the absurd, namely to prove that the spirit sprung in the end from a clod of earth...  

This manner of (non)thinking

seeks to explain everything from below; to erect no matter what hypothesis, provided it excludes real causes, which are transcendent and not material... 

There's much here that goes to the ambiguous "in between" status unique to man, but Schuon formulates it differently (and more succinctly) than Voegelin:

man is by definition situated between an Intellection which connects him to God and a world that has the power to separate him from God... 

Therefore, man "possesses the paradoxical freedom to wish in his turn to make himself God." The possibility of such a rupture -- or fall, to coin a term -- "is present from the start owing to the very ambiguity of the human condition," suspended as we are "between the Infinite and the finite."

Any form of reductionism collapses the former into the latter, and "Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser." Such a rookie mistake "is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be." Inconceivable, because to conceive it is to have transcended it. 

In the next essay, Aspects of the Theophanic Phenomenon of Consciousness, Schuon gets into how man qua man is always open to what transcends him: "What is proper to man alone is the Intellect open to the Absolute." But

There are two tendencies in the human spirit, either to reduce God to the world, or the Absolute to the relative, or to reduce [I would say expand] the world to God or the relative to the Absolute. 

Idealism at one end, materialism at the other. Both necessarily collapse the between-space in which human beings are privileged to abide. Which is to say, they demote man and fire reality. But in reality, 

starting from the recognition of the immediately tangible mystery that is subjectivity or intelligence, it is easy to understand that the origin of the Universe is, not inert and unconscious matter, but a spiritual Substance...

Which is not to say it isn't a mystery, but it's the fun kind, for we are each a little mystery that is a prolongation of the big mystery of Myster Big:

all that exists is inscribed a priori in the theomorphic substance of our intelligence -- there is no integral consciousness that does not prolong absolute Consciousness...

That's the good nous. The bad news is that

The rational faculty detached from its supernatural context is necessarily opposed to man and is bound to give rise in the end to a way of thought and a form of life both of which are opposed to man.

You know -- all the isms and olatries referenced in yesterday's post. One word: pride.

Intelligence separated from its supra-individual source is accompanied by that lack of sense of proportions which one calls pride; conversely, pride prevents intelligence, when it has become rationalism, from rising to its source.

Yeah, it's human, but "nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the 'purely human'" -- this being a kind of freak or monster that denies "its own nature which nonetheless enables it to think" and allows it to "feel at ease in a world" that "exempts man from the effort of transcending things and of transcending himself." Congratulations: you've bypassed the human vocation!  

intelligence is dehumanized and gives rise to materialism, even existentialism, hence to a "thinking" which is human only by its mode and of which the content is properly sub-human. 

But what is a bad man but a good man's teacher? "The very excess of their inanity" bears witness "to the reality of the spirit and consequently to its primacy." 

And circling back for a moment to Voegelin, he speaks of the "pneumopathology" of ideologues who deform and distort the order of being in order to make their magical visions appear attainable; and of "the temptation to fall from [the] uncertain truth" of the in-between (i.e., of a faith-full openness to transcendent being) to the "certain untruth" of existential closure in the fanciful constructs of their ideological matrices.

The Progressive Ban on Questions and Questioners

If I understand the previous post correctly, it put forth the paradoxical -- or at least convoluted -- idea that man is always in the form of a question, and that, in the Incarnation, the very God who is the answer to this question assumes the form of the questioner who seeks him.   

Clearly, the infinitely open question that we are points toward verticality and transcendence. No horizontal, terrestrial, or finite answer satisfies the Question of questions -- or rather, man has a habit of positing answers that are seemingly designed to make the Question go away, but are absurdly incapable of doing so, e.g., materialism, scientism, positivism, Marxism, progressivism, et al.  

Or just say ismism, or ismolatry, or craniorectal exploration.

Now yesterday, in my restless search for something to stimulate my head, I reread Voegelin's Science, Politics & Gnosticism, and couldn't help noticing certain parallels to this question of man the Question (and questioner).  

First of all Voegelin is famous -- or obscure, rather -- for the idea that the structure of being involves two poles -- immanence and transcendence -- and that we are always in between them. Always have been and always will be, because this is just the way Being is. If it weren't this way, we could never know it, period.

Yes, it's a mystery, but a infinitely fruitful one. Unless, of course, we stop asking questions, or worse, the Powers that Be won't permit questions. Then progress stops, at least until the vertical space reopens for isness, for example, as Elon Musk is attempting to do vis-a-vis the political space.

Why then is he being vilified for doing something that is intrinsically spiritually healthy? I mean this literally, in that the very essence of spiritual health involves maintaining an open system with verticality and transcendence, so vertical closure of any kind is inherently pneumopathological, for it results in spiritual malnourishment, asphyxiation, craniorectal occlusion, and/or death. 

Voegelin uses the term "deformation" 

for the destruction of the order of the soul, which should be "formed" by the love of transcendental perfection inherent in the fundamental tension [between immanence and transcendence] of existence (Eugene Webb).  

You could say that he regards the genuine philosopher as truly normative, as in lover of wisdom:

As Voegelin conceives it, philosophy is characterized by the realization that one does not actually possess transcendental truth but is oriented toward it through love [of wisdom, truth, beauty, goodness, etc.] (ibid.).

But you will have noticed that this is precisely what ismism and ideolatry don't do. Rather, they indulge in philodoxy, which is the love of, like, just your opinion, man: it

conceives of truth in immanentistic rather than transcendental terms and tends to claim a perfect correspondence between ultimate reality and ideas or interpretive models used to represent it (ibid).

Moreover, 

whereas philosophy is inherently oriented toward further inquiry through openness to the Question, philodoxy is the expression of a desire to put an end to questioning and thereby escape from the "tension of existence" (ibid.).

Which isn't just obnoxious and annoying, but humanly catastrophic, as seen, for example, in the metastatic ideologies of the 20th century. As of 1991 (with the collapse of the Soviet Union) it looked as if the last of these cancers had been eradicated, but it is very much as if this spiritual retrovirus sleeps in human nature until opportune conditions allow it to reassert itself. 

Like now.

If you want to look for evidence of the retrovirus, one thing to monitor is attacks on free speech; it starts with certain forbidden questions, but again, has a tendency to attack and stifle the Questioner (and therefore human nature) as such -- perhaps seen most explicitly on our elite university campuses. One can only emit a laugh -- the hollow and bitter kind -- at Joseph Pieper's innocent description of the purpose of the university:

It means a refuge where discussion takes place, in total independence, on just one question: How are things?, "what are the facts"? 

This free space -- or space of intellectual freedom -- "must be safeguarded and protected" from interference by forces opposed to the open engagement with the transcendent truth of What Is.

Ha. 

One thing that occurred to me in rereading S, P & G is that we focus too much on this or that ideology instead of the deeper structure of ideology per se, which is again the expression of intrinsic pneumopathology -- which is why it is in the very nature of leftism to ban speech, because speech has a way of leading to forbidden questions and unlawful answers. 

Leftism is literally inconceivable without suppression of the very questions that discredit it. "The opposition becomes truly radical and dangerous"

when philosophical questioning is itself called into question, when doxa [hardened opinion] takes on the appearance of philosophy, when it arrogates to itself the name of science and prohibits science as non-science (Voegelin). 

As seen most vividly, I suppose, in the non-sciences of catastrophic global warming, transgender ideology, and experimental vaccines. In each of these conspicuous examples, Questions and Questioners are banned and punished -- not because of any confident and robust science, rather, the opposite, for such thinkers know that their construct "will collapse as soon as the basic philosophical question is asked," which "induces him to prohibit such questions."  

When "socialist man" speaks, man has to be silent (ibid.).

But not only socialist man, for Voegelin outlines "three major types for whom a human inquiry has become a practical impossibility," including also "positivist man" and "national-socialist man" -- to which we might add scientistic man, New Atheist man, transgender man, and various others. 

Each of these is founded upon a "resolve to ignorance, for arbitrary occlusion," and for a "defensive stand against much that is knowledge." In this pathological movement "man remains shut off from transcendent being. The will to power strikes against the wall of being, which has become a prison" (ibid.).

Or matrix, as we like to call it. The normal man becomes acutely aware of suffering in this matrix of "demonic occlusion. He is imprisoned in the icy light of his existence." Schuon often speaks of the modern mind being encased under a layer of ice.   

Is there hope? Yes, but mostly on a retail basis, as

No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order (ibid.).

Which is to say, the open order -- or order of openness -- whereby man has the privilege of participation in the ground of being.

I'll stop now and pick up the thread in the next post.

The Answer Becomes the Question that the Question Might Become Answer?

One more post on Foundations of Karl Rahner, and we're done. This chapter is on the Incarnation, and let's see what we can make of it. Apologies up front: the post is rather loose and free-associational, because the material is. We'll start with this:

By becoming incarnate, the Logos made the human reality God's own reality. When God took a human nature, human nature reached the goal toward which it had always tended. God "became" the human nature that God had prepared for the Logos, so that human nature might be divinized.

In this scenario, human beings must have evolved to the point that this two-way movement was possible; obviously, the Logos could not incarnate as a cow or chimpanzee, so there must already exist something about humans that makes them a fit receptacle for this divine indwelling. 

Humans must be sufficiently aware of reaching toward the transcendent before the transcendent can reach down to us. You can't have an answer if you don't have the question. 

It seems that the whole durn cosmos is evolving toward this point:

The ground of being becomes the one toward whom the person strives. It is a magnet that draws us, enabling us to transcend what we were and to become what we are called to be.... Persons are not just a product of the cosmos, but their union with God is the very goal of the cosmos.

So, we definitely got that going for us: "Because God became a human being, the gulf between divinity and humanity collapsed." It's a circular thing, with both ascending and descending currents, so to speak.

When we think of God assuming human nature, this implies that God also assumes the human being's very orientation toward the infinite mystery of God. "God has taken that orientation as God's own reality," as if to say that in assuming human nature, (↓) assumes (↑). Come to think of it, why else would Jesus pray to his Father?

The potential to obey God is the human nature that God becomes. 

Now, how can the immutable "become" something? It is as if Being becomes becoming that becoming might become Being:

the Logos assumes the reality of something that is capable of becoming. That "something" is the human reality of Jesus. The one who is not subject to change (i.e., the Logos) can be subject to change in something else (the man Jesus of Nazareth). 

I call it metacosmic circularity: 

In the Incarnation, God "becomes" what has come from God... God "creates the human reality by the very fact that he assumes it as his own. "

Ultimately,  

God creates in order to make creatures who are capable of being assumed by God. God creates human beings who can become part of God's own history. 

Which I suppose goes to the finality of both creation and Incarnation; or rather, the Incarnation is the final cause of the creation, Bob asked?

Rahner makes the point that, prior to the Incarnation, man is already an "abbreviated word of God." Humanity is the "cipher" of God, which is to say, a sort of secret message. Of what? 

Well, for one thing, a capacity to "bear" the Incarnation. Again, cows and reptiles and monkeys couldn't very well bear the strain, but we are already the image and likeness prior to the Incarnation, so we definitely got that going for us. 

In other words, humans qua humans exist "because there was to be a Son of Man," and "are a 'shorthand' expression for God's Word." Well, cool. But the (longhand?) Word then "shows us the human nature to which we are called," such that "the human being 'participates' in the mystery of God." Specifically,

we participate in God's mystery in the same way that a question participates in the answer to that question. 

We said in the previous post that man is a Question -- an open-ended one that can never be exhausted by any finite, terrestrial, scientific, or manmade answer. No, this is truly a Question that is superior to any answer we could ever provide.

But is there even an answer to this Question we are? For Rahner, 

God answers that question in the Logos. The question (i.e., human being) participates in the answer (i.e., God's Logos).

This Question (Bob) has a question: it seems that anthropology is theology, and vice versa? In a manner of speaking?

Anthropology is the theology that God speaks by uttering the Word as human flesh. Anthropology is our theology when we seek Christ and God via the human being. In Christ the finite has received an infinite depth.

So, Christ is the answer to the infinite question we are? "God has spoken the ultimate word as the truth of human life," so there you go.

It seems it's a matter of inserting ourselves into the metacosmic circle by means of faith. There it is again: 

Jesus leads us back to God in an ascending motion, a motion initiated by God.

God is one of us?! Or, God becomes the Question that the Question might become Answer? "Humanity finds in Jesus the one by whom God intended from all eternity to reconcile us to the divine self." But

The Christian is always in the process of becoming a Christian.... A person is always a Christian in order to become one.

And Christ is "not only the eternal Logos, but also the 'first fulfillment' of humanity. He was the first to fulfill the promise which life with God holds for every person." 

I think I strained a muscle in my head. The end.

The Experience of Experience of the Mystery of Mystery

Or something. This book on Karl Rahner turned out to be a bit of a chore. Seems rather disjointed and repetitive, plus the attempt to translate English into English renders the prose hardly less annoying. I'll salvage what I can. 

This chapter -- Man in the Presence of Absolute Mystery -- begins with a meditation on the very meaning of the word "God." What if the word were stricken from the dictionary? For an atheist, I suppose nothing would be lost, since the word refers to nothing anyway.

But even then, it must refer to something, even if only to a universal subjective experience, since there is no language that doesn't have an equivalent term for the ultimate transcendent ground of reality. 

Either the word will disappear or it will survive as a question..., a question about the goal and meaning of life. 

This is why I came up with the idea of using a semantically unsaturated symbol (O) for what the word "God" represents to different people -- and the symbol (?!) for the spontaneous irruption of the Experience.

Problem is, if everyone has their own idiosyncratic meaning, then no communication is possible. Rahner seems to have similar concerns, so "instead of a concept," he

uses the phrase "holy mystery." He calls it the "term" of transcendence. Term is related to terminus, end, or goal. This term is both present in transcendence and as the way to transcendence. 

Which very much reminds me of Voegelin, since he too sees transcendence as a term or pole of the great In Between we inhabit -- more like an arrow pointing toward a reality we can never reach: human experience is between the poles of immanence and transcendence. Moreover, the QUESTION is Voegelin's term for 

the transcendental pole of truth as such: "not just any question but the quest concerning the mysterious ground of all being." 

Clearly there is mystery at both ends of the tension (ours and God's), and it seems to me that the majority of mid-to-lowbrow cultural activity is designed to deny the mystery, to make it go away, or to distract us from it. But there it is. It's not going anywhere. Indeed, Rahner refers to it as a permanent existential, and why not? It is "a part of who we are," but

The discovery of this experience itself is a mystery. The mystery is not reducible to what we can say about our transcendental knowledge. 

Ultimately, "the concept of God is not a concept we can grasp. It is, rather, what grasps us." It is always over the subjective horizon, while at the same time being the ground of subjectivity. 

It reminds me of the Big Bang, only on the inside, in that consciousness too forever expands and differentiates. But from what and into what? It's a mystery, but not the unintelligible kind, rather, the infinitely intelligible kind. Like an owl staring at the sun, there's not insufficient but too much Light.

That's me talking. Or at least the caffeine. What does Rahner say? 

transcendental experience allows us to know ourselves as finite beings -- finite beings who can transcend their finitude.

And -- me talking again -- it seems that experience as such is always transcendental. Which is why it is impossible to describe or define, since any description or definition presupposes experience. It seems that experience as such is a rock-bottom, permanent existential -- that it is a ceaselessly flowing Mystery, and that this is simultaneously the least and most we can say about it.

Geez, I hope I'm not turning all Germanic on you, but wading around down here at the bottom of subjectivity is tricky. Here is Voegelin's stab at defining EXPERIENCE: it is "a 'luminous perspective' within the process of reality." And EXISTENTIAL CONSCIOUSNESS is

the reflective self-awareness of human existence in the metaxy, i.e., between poles of immanence and transcendence, finitude and infinity, imperfection and perfection, and so on. See also "truth of existence." 

Okay, don't mind if I do. This latter is "transcendentally oriented conscious existence" and 

involves the experience of: (1) finiteness and creatureliness; (2) dissatisfaction with imperfection and a sense of transcendental perfection; (3) the luminosity or manifestness of such experience in consciousness; (4) the self-transcending tendency of consciousness seeking fullness of truth.

Sounds like a luminous movement toward perfect truth, goodness, and beauty, or something.

For Rahner, 

transcendental knowledge comes from a direct contemplation of the source of transcendence. We contemplate it and call it "God."  

The problem -- or temptation -- is that

by speaking of God, we might lose sight of what we mean. What we mean is the source of the experience of transcendence, the holy mystery. It might be obscured by the concept we use to express it. If we try to describe the source as "absolute being," we might settle for an abstraction, not the source itself.

Now, the Big Question is whether this post is getting anywhere, or if we're just going around in circles on some kind of wild nous chase. I can't answer that, but Rahner "proposes that we call the source of our original experience of transcendence the 'holy mystery,'" so as not to confuse it "with a stereotype, a myth, or a conventional image."

Certainly we can agree that "Anyone searching for God 'contained in' reality seeks a false God." But not so fast, because "Those searching for a God wholly other and distant will never know God or themselves" either.

So, it seems we can say a lot about God, but we can always say more: "that is why we acknowledge that God is infinite, indefinable, and ineffable." 

It's repetitive, but maybe it needs to be:

The experience of transcendence opens up to us the holy mystery. It is a "mystery" because we cannot fully fathom it.... Rather, holy mystery is what we encounter in the experience of transcendence. Transcendence moves us in freedom and love towards its goal.  

Which we never reach. For again, "We human beings are the tension"

between our categorical statements about God and the transcendental reality itself.... it is the experience of all people who know themselves as being constantly in a relationship with a mystery....

Instead of being an object we know, God is what allows any knowledge whatsoever to take place.

I'll buy that, but I'll tell you what: wouldn't it be nice if God himself could accommodate us and just incarnate as the Mystery or something? That would be a big help. Perhaps we'll tackle this subject in the next post. Or move on to a less annoying subject.

I Am the Question

The previous post ended with a description of our politico-cultural matrix, and the image comes to mind of a Roach Motel. If you're a roach, the best policy is to not venture in at all, because if you do, you're not coming out. 

You could say the motel is "designed to trap prey," but not really, because at least the predator has a use for the prey. Spiders don't catch insects just for the hell of it. Snakes only eat when they're hungry, which is only every week or two.

But it seems this Predator does enjoy trapping and toying with its prey just for the hell of it. I wonder what Uncle Screwtape would say? Not sure, but while looking it up I found this:

There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan (Lewis).

And this:

In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. 

So, the Motel is on the inside? And locks from the inside? Hell is

the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity.... the damned are, in one sense, successful rebels to the end... the doors of hell are locked on the inside....  

Now, what does this have to do with the book I began reading yesterday, The Foundations of Karl Rahner: A Paraphrase of the Foundations of Christian Faith? Maybe we could start by asking why the human head is such a battleground, with claims and counterclaims.  

For Rahner, human beings are the "universal question." This being the case, I suppose there will always be bad, superficial, partial, and dysfunctional answers. The deeper point is that our unlimited questioning implies our own unlimitedness, i.e., transcendence:

we, in the very act of reflecting on our limitations, overcome those limitations.... We know ourselves as capable of knowing more, of transcending what had limited us before. This experience of transcendence provides an indirect knowledge of God... 

This is very much reminiscent of Voegelin, in that we are always situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and that's just the way it is: "the human being is open by nature," which is the key to transcendence:

We know ourselves as capable of knowing more. That is the essence of transcendental experience.

In realizing this, God is implicitly present: 

present as mystery, as the absolute and incomprehensible source of all that is. What we know, in knowing anything, is that our knowledge is a small vessel in a vast sea of mystery.

Agreed:

this is what makes us human. We have been created with the ability to encounter the transcendent God in the experiences of daily life.

Or not, which I suppose goes to the battlefield alluded to above. Which further implies that the real battle is between openness-to-transcendence vs. enclosed-in-immanence, no matter what form it takes. Could it be this simple? Or is it simpler?

As persons we are hearers, and

Hearers recognize that they are limited. But in that very recognition, they begin to imagine how they might surpass their limits. That is the first step to actually transcending them.

This will become clearer as we proceed, but this ability to hear is key, for

the philosophy that presumes that the human being is able to hear is not absolutely free of theology. In fact, it is implicit theology.

I would go so far as to say that human personhood presupposes God, for the human being

is capable of transcendence, responsibility, freedom, honesty, and openness to mystery. The Christian message presupposes that its hearers are people with these capacities -- in a word, are persons.

However, there is always the temptation to forgo the mystery in favor of something less, "to shift responsibility for their choices to something else -- to history, let us say, or to nature." Nevertheless, persons qua persons are always "more than what a mechanistic anthropology says we are":

The sciences tempt us to think that we can fully explain ourselves. But this is illusory. Transcendental experience suggests that I myself encompass every effort by science to explain me. The person transcends all attempts to reduce him or her to a system or to full comprehension. 

 So, lead us not into temptation, especially that one.

It's all very Gödelian, for again, "By reflecting on our limits, we begin to imagine new possibilities for ourselves and to transcend our limits" -- a bit like reversing figure and ground. We have plenty of answers, but they never provide a complete answer to the Question we are. Sorry for the repetition, but maybe you didn't hear it the first time:

Whenever a person affirms the possibility that he or she can question things, even in a finite way, that person surpasses the finitude. Why? Because the horizon of finitude is always receding as one discovers more. And as the person experiences that horizon receding, the person experiences himself or herself as spirit. One is spirit whenever one acknowledges one's limits. In that acknowledgement, one has already surpassed the limits...

On the other hand -- again, going to the battle -- 

one can dully and unimaginatively "accept" one's existence without curiosity. This happens when we acknowledge that existence poses a question, but nevertheless refuse to pursue it.  

But just because you are not interested in the battle, it hardly means the battle isn't interested in you: "we are ourselves limited. But in our limits, we are connected to what is absolute," and "We transcend what we are by being open to to what being offers."

one can try to to evade responsibility and pretend that one is merely a product of forces outside oneself. But that is a lie. 

Now, just "Who is the other who enables us to transcend ourselves? We call that other the ineffable mystery." I call it O, but that's the end of chapter one. Tomorrow we'll delve into chapter two, Man in the Presence of Absolute Mystery. 

Horizontal Absurcularity in the Matrix of the Predator

As mentioned in yesterday's post, if the human subject is a miraculous gate opened up in the middle of creation, then so too is the object. We often speak of the irreducible intersubjectivity of human beings, but in Thomist metaphysics there is also a kind of "inter-objectivity" that renders knowledge possible.

That is to say, objects have a kind of dual existence outside and inside our heads. The latter is not the former, but nor is it not the former; specifically, "a thing is the object of the soul in a double way," and "knowledge takes place in the degree in which the thing known is in the knower" (Thomas). 

it is evident that extra-mental realities cannot be in the mind of the knowing subject per se, but they can be there by representation (Garrigou-Lagrange).

In other words, something of the object exists simultaneously in both the object known and in the intellect that knows, AKA the intelligible essence. If not, then to hell with it: there is no knowledge of reality, rather, just an ephemeral dream of a transient hallucination.

Again, "Objectivity is none other than the truth, in which the subject and object coincide" (Schuon). If ideas just relate to other ideas and not to intelligible reality, then Kant is correct: man "is imprisoned in his subjectivity" and "has no way to know if these things have objective existence or not" (Bina & Ziarani). 

Now in reality, it is precisely because of the intellect 

that man can recognize the truth independently of his own subjectivity. The very fact that men communicate with one another, and understand each other, is indicative of common, universal truths, to which all men have access (ibid.). 

This is not to say that man does not enclose himself in matrices of pure subjectivism and relativism: for obviously there are "Those who seek to enclose the Universe within their shortsighted logic" and who fail to understand "that the sum of possible phenomenal knowledge is inexhaustible":

In all this wish to accumulate knowledge of relative things, the metaphysical dimension -- which alone takes us out of the vicious circle of the phenomenal and the absurd -- is expressly put aside; it is as if a man were endowed with with all possible faculties of perception minus intelligence (Schuon).  

It is as if we place arbitrary limits on the limitless, and "Outside its self-imposed but unrecognized limits," intelligence "remains more ignorant than the most rudimentary magic":

One tries to explain "horizontally" that which is explainable only "in a vertical sense".... Such a science is assuredly cut to the measure of modern man who conceived it and who is at the same time its product (ibid.). 

Sad!

Really, it's just Genesis 3 All Over Again: "The world becomes increasingly a system of stage-settings" while "imposing upon it an unshakeable conviction that all this is 'reality' and that there is no other." 

A note to myself in the margin says THE MATRIX, and just this morning I read a good description of how it works these days -- and it seems to be working better than ever. The author says that sometimes

I can see it all around me: the grid. The veins and sinews of the Machine that surrounds us and pins us and provides for us and defines us now. I imagine a kind of network of shining lines in the air, glowing like a dewed spiderweb in the morning sun. I imagine the cables and the satellite links, the films and the words and the records and the opinions, the nodes and the data centres that track and record the details of my life....  

I see this thing, whatever it is, being constructed, or constructing itself around me, I see it rising and tightening its grip, and I see that none of us can stop it from evolving into whatever it is becoming. 

I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net.

I think: These are things designed to trap prey. 

Same: I see it too, and where there is prey, then surely there is a predator. To be continued...

Objectivity and Intersubjectivity

Some excerpts from (and comments on) a somewhat One Cosmos-ish article called The Natural Path to the Transcendent, by George Stanciu:

The great discovery of ethology is that animals do not perceive what things really are; an animal’s perception is limited to a few key elements that will cause it to act.... An animal’s world is not the world we see but more closely resembles “a small, poorly furnished room.”

Other animals essentially live in their neurology, which provides only a kind of crude model projected onto the world. One might say that their engagement with the world is on a need-to-know basis. 

Frogs, for example, don't even need to know about insects per se, but only "small moving objects." The frog "will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement." 

How did -- and do -- human beings escape from this representational sub-world? Of course, Kant maintained that we do not and cannot. Rather, just like any other animal, we exist in our own projected categories. They may be more subtle or sophisticated, but we are ultimately no more in touch with reality -- itself unknowable -- than any other animal.

Well, first of all, like anyone could even know that:

If man is subjective and has no way of knowing anything objectively, then how did Kant come to know that man lives in his own subjectivity and is confined to it? In other words, how can a man imprisoned in his own subjectivity proclaim an objective truth about everyone, including himself? (Bina & Ziarani)

As Schuon rightly says, 

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

But the second -- or maybe even tied with the first -- would be the miracle that is objectivity, which is to say, the conformity of our own intelligence to the objects of the world.   

The prerogative of the human state is objectivity.... The intelligence is objective to the extent that it registers that which is.

Objectivity is none other than the truth, in which the subject and object coincide... (ibid.).

Back to Stanciu: 

Of all the natural creatures, only human beings can grasp the whole. The study of animal perception re-discovered the spiritual nature of Homo sapiens -- the capacity to be connected to all that is, a fundamental principle of every wisdom tradition.

Also true, but by virtue of what principle? For Schuon,

God has opened a gate in the middle of creation, and this open gate of the world towards God is man... 

Agreed, but how did and does the gate open? Stanciu affirms the One Cosmos view that it has to do with the unique conditions of earliest childhood: 

as the human infant emerges from the womb, it looks for a human face and listens for a soprano voice. Nature directs the infant to seek its mother. The very first experience in a person’s life is connecting himself or herself to another person.

In short, it is precisely our neurological immaturity that becomes the means of induction into the world of intersubjectivity and relatedness to others, eventually mediated by language:

Without language, without others to learn language from, the mental capacities that Ms. Helen Keller, you, and I were born with would not have developed, and our lives would not have been much higher than that of a chimpanzee or a bonobo.

Being subjectively "open systems" is precisely what lifts us out of the condition of being trapped and confined to our own subjective perceptions, which is the fate of other animals. 

But even then, it is possible to reify our own subjectivity and confuse the particular with the universal, which goes to the problem of mind parasites: 

The curse of social living is that every society implants ideas and instills habits of thinking and feeling that limit its members to a particular perspective, one that, as a general rule, is contrary to human nature and destructive to neighboring societies. The paradox is that social living greatly extends our capabilities and yet limits us.

Which is why "Homo sapiens is the only species that can act contrary to its nature." 

Running low on time, but this vertical enclosure is a Big Problem, and it is symbolized by the timeless events of Genesis 3, whereby man foregoes relationship with God in favor of sealing himself in his own pseudo-absoluteness. Is there a way up and out? Yes, but only one assoul at a time:

Of course, the unborn within me, my true self, was a complete mystery, so after stumbling around for years exploring Hinduism and Buddhism, I turned to the deepest understanding of the human person that Christianity offers.

To be continued... 

The World, the Adversary, and the Divine Presence

Unlike artificial intelligence, human intelligence is and must be aware of its limits, on pain of enclosing itself in unintelligence -- or in an intelligent stupidity. Not only is the history of philosophy a history of models of reality, so too is each and every person such a model. 

I suppose the average person has an implicit model composed of fragments and contingencies that one more or less tries to force reality to be; but reality is what it is prior to our thinking about it.

The Existential Climate Emergency is an example of a model that wants to be the reality. And for some reason, people want to be terrified by this model. Indeed, those of us who aren't terrified are lying dog-faced pony soldiers. 

Now, no doubt life itself -- at least in the human mode -- is an unending Emergency. People talk about "identity crises, "midlife crises," and "existential crises," which are somewhat beside the point in the face of the Crisis. 

What is this crisis? Here again, there are as many ways to symbolize it as there are people. Most people don't think it through to the foundation, for which reason a variety of retail crises are available to purchase off the rack, as it were. Higher education, for example, has become little more than the internalization of various crises, which again symbolize and conceal the crisis.  

For example, adolescence is always a crisis, the crisis of the loss of childhood and the uncertainty of what it means to be an adult. Back when I was an adolescent I assumed that attainment of adulthood would end the crisis, but it just replaces one with another.  

Come to think of it, I also assumed that acquisition of a Ph.D. would end the crisis of epistemology -- or, in the parlance of the times, of being an idiot, and I suppose it worked for at least a couple of weeks before I came to my senses and realized the models weren't the reality. 

It was around that same time that I was in my phase of peak leftism, which again allows one to project and externalize one's existential crisis into those various off-the-rack concerns alluded to above, from structural racism to nuclear power to American imperialism, et al. 

You can deny a lot of personal problems by pretending that we're all gonna die from, say, a nuclear power plant meltdown. I suppose you had to be there, but the hysteria worked, since it resulted in the abolition of nuclear power in California. Apparently there's one plant left, scheduled to be shut down in 2025. 

And yet, people are no happier, since one crisis is just replaced by another (and the "solution" to one crisis often causes the next one). Similarly, the moment homosexuals are allowed to marry, we find ourselves in a crisis of "transphobia." 

Along these lines, Schuon writes that 

Serenity is to keep oneself so to speak above the clouds, in the calm and coolness of emptiness and far from the dissonances of this lower world; it is never to allow the soul to immerse itself in impasses of disturbances, bitterness, or secret revolt....

The man who is conscious of the nature of pure Being willingly remains in the moment that Heaven has assigned to him; he is not feverishly straining towards the future nor does he dwell lovingly or sadly over the past. The pure present is the moment of the Absolute: it is now -- neither yesterday nor tomorrow -- that we stand before God.

In the same book (Echoes of Perennial Wisdom) he writes that

The habitual dream of the ordinary man lives on the past and future; his heart hangs, as it were, over the past and is carried away by the future at one and the same time, instead of resting in Being.

This is not what you would call practical or pragmatic advice, but then again, the most important truths are for their own sake, not for the sake of any lesser end. It seems that the implicit motivation for all those Practical Concerns is to finally abide in Being. Is it possible to bypass the middle man and proceed straight to Being? Asking for a friend.

Whatever may be the phenomena and whatever their causes, there is always That Which Is; and That Which Is, is beyond the world of tumult, contradictions, and disappointments.... Nothing can tarnish It, and no one can take it from us.... the accidents pass, the Substance remains (ibid.).

Sounds good! Where do we sign up? 

Let the world be what it is and take refuge in Truth, Peace, and Beauty, wherein is neither doubt nor any blemish.

Easier said than done?

there is in every man a tendency to attach too much to this or that element of passing life or to worry about it too much, and the adversary takes advantage of this in order to cause troubles for us.

Probably to understand the nature of this adversary is to stop externalizing him into all those myths provided by the world to explain and justify our unhappiness. Rather, it is necessary to 

not allow ourselves to be excessively troubled by the things of the world, seeing that dissonances cannot but exist, the world being what it is.  

Life would be great if it weren't for... the world.   

Now, the world -- our world, anyway -- is person, time, and place; I mean everybody has to be someone somewhere at some time. 

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to being what one is, and on the other hand one has to become a place of the Divine Presence....

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to being where one is, and on the other hand, one has to turn this place into a center through the remembrance of God....

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to living in the moment in which one lives, and on the other hand one has to turn this moment into an Eternal Present, which every present moment becomes through the Remembrance of God... 

So, we got that going for us.

Being, Reality, Absoluteness, and Other Truths that Matter

I'll keep repeating it as long as Davila keeps saying it:

In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter.

Each person is also capable of feeling puzzled by all the ins & outs and what-have-yous that must be integrated and woven into the cosmic area rug. Maybe it's just the stress talking, but sometimes the mind is not limber and the plan is too complicated. We're suddenly out of our element and lose our train of thought. There is no frame of reference. 

When this happens to me, I go back to basics -- to the truths that matter to which the Aphorist alludes. What are they? 

We touched on the subject yesterday, but only very lightly. We need a plan -- not a complicated one, because something always goes wrong with one of those. Rather, one that is beautiful in its simplicity, like a Swiss philosopher.

Schuon's simplest book is called Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, consisting of short passages, often a single sentence. I wouldn't say they're aphorisms, since their more blunt, nor do they twist the knife, as do so many of Davila's wise cracks. For example, here is the first one:

The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute.

Of course, this has a lot of missing context and implications that the reader must bring to the table. Davila may convey the same idea, but more in the form of a guffah-HA! experience -- for example, 

Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see.

Or

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment. 

And

We conservatives provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers.

I suppose the Absolute is literally the simplest idea -- as is God, who is "absolute simplicity, which consists of all perfections eminently in harmony" (Garrogou-Lagrange). We are able to participate in these perfections, even if we can never be them. 

A few posts back we were discussing Beyond Being, about which G-L has this to say: the Deity is 

above being (super-being)..., as it is the Thought of Thought and the subsisting love of the Supreme Good.

And

From this it follows that the Deity as such is naturally unknowable and consequently ineffable. 

Nevertheless, we can know at least that much, which is far from nothing. We know that O is and must be, and that we are not O. We can deny the Absolute, but "Error cannot descend lower." Nevertheless, fallen man never stops trying to fall further.

The very last section of this massive tome is entitled Conclusion: the true God or radical absurdity. As in change my mind: "We must choose one of the two: either the ineffable essence," 

or else the universal confusion and destruction of all forms of truth and goodness in an absurd identification with error and evil.

Is it really that simple? The short answer is Yes, although it takes G-L 900 pages to explain why. But deny the Absolute, and "the words 'integrity' and 'lying' no longer have any precise significance. There are no longer any lies, but merely successive opinions." Truly truly, everything is just your opinion, man.

But here's the deal: "The supreme Cause is more knowable and intelligible in itself than all other causes." Likewise, "Matter of itself is obscure, God is light; time is more obscure than eternity." 

These are all implications of the simple affirmation that The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute.

This is why it is impossible to engage in honest debate with someone who denies the Absolute, because such a person has made an absolute of the constricted matrix in which he dwells. As Voegelin describes it, "Rational debate" cannot prevail

because the partner to the discussion [does] not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence.

AKA a Second Reality, such that 

behind the appearance of rational debate there [lurks] the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared....

"In more gloomy moments" -- such as the moment we are collectively living through -- this corrosive force "may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization -- unless of course you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality."

In which case, things are going just great. 

About the collapse of reality, let's switch seers to a very compact book called Philosophy of Science in the Light of the Perennial Wisdom that asks, "how do we know if anything is true?"

before we can begin to look for a criterion of truth, we have to ascertain that there is such a thing as truth. Now, unless one accepts that there is indeed such a thing as truth, nothing holds: remove truth and everything collapses.

Well, not if I have anything to say about it, for even to say "I do not know" is "to imply that I know one thing is true and that is precisely the fact that 'I do not know.'" 

And

To say there is such a thing as truth is to speak in absolute terms. The notions of "being," "reality," "truth," and "absoluteness" are thus intrinsically interrelated. Reason cannot prove them; on the contrary, it takes them for granted, that is to say, it cannot function in their absence.

To be continued.

A Map of the Bewilderness and God for the Perplexed

Scholastic Thomism, neo-scholastic Thomism, existential Thomism, analytical Thomism, phenomenological Thomism, transcendental Thomism, ressourcement Thomism, Cracow Circle Thomism, River Forest Thomism... 

Sometimes things just get too complicated for the simple trailer Thomist. Just when I think I've found a congenial precursor -- Rahner -- come to find out he's already yesterday's nous. In a book I read yesterday called Principles of Catholic Theology, White tells me I'm fifty years behind the times:

The theological anthropology of Karl Rahner that greatly influenced the life of the Church in the 1970s presumed a kind of normative modern European intellectual consensus in the academy and the Church that no longer exists today. 

He claims that this consensus "has perished in the flames of postmodernism," but then again, what hasn't? Postmodernism is the fire it pretends to extinguish, the pneumatological disease it pretends to cure. If it doesn't come straight from hell, nothing does. It is the Voice of the Abyss, a universal acid, and not the good kind.

Both this book and the one mentioned in the previous post give far too much weight to contemporary approaches to philosophy, when philosophy as such should be absolutely impervious to such trends and fashions. Harumph.  

White also cites "the rise of analytic philosophy and the return of scientific positivism," as if these have anything to do with the perennial philosophy, timeless truth, and irony-clad wisdom of the Raccoon. 

I see that Edward Feser has a  series of posts breaking it all down, but not simply enough for the trailer Thomist. 

Far from being liberated by postmodernity, White goes on to say that today's students

suffer acutely from the lack of any normative philosophical orientation or basic unified intellectual formation at all. Typically they are offered no unifying account of reality that spans across the diversity of their intellectual disciplines. And indeed, where could they procure one?

Besides here at One Cosmos? 

Students often long for some way to make sense of the unity of philosophical experience, so as to see how the world might have some analyzable, overarching meaning.

Do they? Harumph. Besides, who cares what students think? Isn't their very purpose in life to STFU and listen? 

We can begin by stipulating that there is One Cosmos, which bats away a host of contenders for the One Philosophy, since the latter (philosophy) must be ordered to the former (cosmos). I'm a simple man, so I begin with O and (¶), the rest being commentary.

Simple but not simplistic, for the space between intelligence and intelligibility is an infinitely evolving one; O is Absolute Being, while (¶) is the transcendental subject, and between them the party never stops. We exist in the tension between immanence and transcendence, or time and eternity, and that's just the way it is. Voegelin:

Eternal being realizes itself in time.

So there. Nor does eternal being "wait for philosophy in order to realize itself," since it never stops happening. History itself "is the process in which eternal being realizes itself in time." 

The locus of this realization is the philosopher, the "lover of wisdom" who "opens his soul to its irruption." 

There is no philosophy without philosophers, namely without men whose soul responds to eternal being.

All those other guys? Not philosophers. And all those other philosophies? Not philosophy.  

Harumph. Details to follow...

One Cosmos and Trailer Thomism

I recently read a book called Systematic Theology: A Roman Catholic Approach, by a Thomas Rausch. Yes, it's rather basic, but sometimes that's just what a lowdown trailer Thomist like me needs, i.e., a map of the territory I find myself lost in. 

This is the problem of the autodidactic (p)layman diving into a subject with no preparation or guidance: you might find yourself at the end before the beginning, or peaks before the foothills. You might find yourself refighting battles that have long since been settled, or supposing there is agreement where there is deep division and controversy. You can even think you're a "Thomist," but come to find out that this means very different things to different schools.

Near as I can tell, we fall in with the Transcendental Thomists, who, among other things, "sought to enter a dialogue with modern philosophy." More importantly, instead of -- or in addition to -- beginning with the senses, this approach turns "to the human subject and the transcendental reach of consciousness," and to "the dynamism of human understanding as disclosing far more than the object known."

Again, traditional Thomism begins with objects of the senses and from there proceeds to concepts and essences. Transcendental Thomism begins at the other end of the teloscope, with what Schuon would call the miracle of the human subject:

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

Interestingly, one of the main spokesmen for this perspective is Karl Rahner, whom records indicate I studied way back in 2012. But that's a perfect example of how the unguided amateur can dive in at the wrong end and not know which way is up. The main thing I remember from his books is that they were unnecessarily obscure and convoluted -- you know, German. It seems I may have to revisit those books.

There is additional commonality with Schuon, in that these thinkers distinguish "between intellect and reason. While discursive reason [is] important, giving us knowledge of the world, concepts, science, and symbols," the intellect is regarded "as an intuitive faculty inclined toward the 'First Truth'":  

The dynamism of human understanding [shows] a desire to move beyond the objects known, beyond finite existence, to unlimited Being as such, the existence of which [is] the a priori condition of the possibility for every speculative judgement.

We are finite but always oriented toward infinitude, always moving beyond what we know, "toward the infinite being of God in his incomprehensibility," which is the very "ground of all knowing":

the infinite is disclosed as the horizon against which every act of human knowledge takes place.... Without experiencing in some way the infinite, we would never grasp the finite.

 Thus, mystery proceeds in both directions, as it were:

both the natural world as well as the experience of transcendence revealed in human knowing testify to God's existence, even if the divine nature remains unknown, for God remains incomprehensible mystery.

This reminds me of Voegelin's conception of living in the dynamic space between the twin mysteries of immanence and transcendence. 

For man qua man is "spirit-in-the-world, open to the absolute" (Rausch). Or, in the words of Rahner, man is "absolute openness to being in general." 

Which leads to the subject of grace, what it is and where it comes from. For a Trailer Thomist such as myself, it seems to be in the nature of things, hence my pneumaticon (↓), which comes down to meet our transcendental striving (↑) toward the Absolute (O). Rahner says something quite similar, that

While still gratuitous, grace is revealed in the constitution of the human person as openness [o] to the absolute. Grace is God's free self-communication... (ibid.)

Rahner maintains that "a purely graceless world has never existed." He "sees the structures of human subjectivity as informed by grace a priori," such that -- and this is big -- "Anthropology is theology and conversely, theology is anthropology" (Rausch).

For me, this is just drawing out the implications of our being made in the image and likeness of the Absolute: we can start at either end, but especially with the Incarnation, we see that man and God are like two mirrors held up to one another. I suppose that fallenness means a disruption in this dynamism, but Christ represents its restoration. 

As it so happens, the very next section in the book goes into the meaning of the fall, and here again I find myself relating to Rahner's approach, whereby 

grace is understood as God's self-communication, God's gracious, enabling, salvific presence, offering to each a participation in the divine life, though of course God's free offer must also be freely accepted.

And the Incarnation "realizes perfectly what every person is potentially," which leads to the subject of divinization or theosis. Rahner sees a "fundamental unity of spirit and matter," and regards the Incarnation as "a moment toward the divinization of the world as a whole."

Or, as a multi-undiscplinary Trailer Thomist would put it, One Cosmos Under God.

All I got this morning.

In the Beginning and End is the Weird

We're still toying with the idea that Being could be a derivation of something deeper or higher, i.e., Beyond Being, or whether this constitutes a contradiction -- or possibly just a nominal difference (basically a name for the unknown and unknowable God of orthodox apophatic theology, not a separate reality). 

Garrigou-Lagrange writes that "The attributes which relate to God's very being" first include unity, truth, and "goodness or perfection." Next comes "infinity which excludes any limitation of essence," then  "immensity and omnipresence which exclude spatial limitation," and "eternity which excludes all time limitation." 

It is unclear from the context why he seems to place infinitude in a second tier of attributes, as if to imply that it is derived from one of the top three (unity, truth, goodness). Either way, when he says that infinitude "excludes any limitation of essence," he means that every being is composed of essence and existence, whereas only in God -- AKA necessary being -- are essence and existence one, in that God's essence is to exist.

Here again, what could be higher than necessary and self-subsisting being? If it is necessary, then it cannot be a possibility, virtuality, or entailment of something else. Nor is there any division in being, neither within itself nor from something else. Rather, the only thing from which it would be divided is non-being, or nothing, which cannot be. 

Again, from the standpoint of apophatic theology, God is of course nothing, but that is due simply to the limitations of finite language to comprehend infinitude. It doesn't necessarily imply a God beyond God, since -- in a manner of speaking, God (in reality) is always and already beyond God (as we conceive him). 

Let's review our cosmic flow chart from a couple posts ago:

Again, we see that the divine essence and supra-personal God is situated above the personal, who is part of relativity and maya. 

However, G-L writes that the "attributes thus derived from Being itself enable us to say of God that He is personal," which is the principle of our own consciousness, intelligence, and liberty. 

Okay, but what's He like, beyond the abstract attributes? This will take us into trinitarian theology, which is over 100 pages into the future. Suffice it to say, Necessary Being turns out to be relative after all, not to Beyond Being, but within itself, nor does this relation "posit in God an evident imperfection." 

Now interestingly, here is some convergence with Schuon, who often speaks of the intellect which is both uncreated and uncreatable. Likewise, G-L writes that  "The human intellect is not merely human, it is also an intellect." And "Inasmuch as it is an intellect, its object, like that of every intellect, is Being itself."

We might say that God is the eternal intellection of his own Being, only in an undivided manner; conversely, for us there is always a partition between being and knowing. Some would say the partition is erased in nondual realization of the divine essence, but I would be content with the beatific vision, which amounts to the same thing, only with me still there to enjoy it. Different yokes for different folks.

Being itself is uncaused; but again, a glance at the chart suggests that Being is in fact caused by Beyond Being. Is this coherent? In a way, yes, in the sense that Being itself is already "without limitations" and "incomprehensible." It is already infinite, and "nothing can be added to the infinite." 

Therefore Infinite Being + Beyond Being doesn't seem to add anything to the equation: "infinity plus one is still infinity." Divine Being is "completely present to itself in one permanent instant." 

Still, I wonder if the revelation of the Trinity helps us to handle some of the same metaphysical problems which the positing of Beyond Being is intended to resolve, so let's flip on ahead to the section covering this, and see if we can reconcile these two perspectives.

First of all, "Reason alone suffices to make known to us God's existence and His principle attributes." And 

It would seem that an infinite being must have infinite fecundity, which cannot but be manifested by the creation of beings that are necessarily finite.... He generates because of the superabundance of his infinite fecundity.

But

Even before God had created, it would have been true to say of Him, that the divine goodness is infinitely communicative.

"Revelation tells us"

that in God there is an eternal and unique Word, generated once and forever by the divine intellect of the Father.

In an analogous way, this could correspond to the antinomy of Beyond Being and Being, in that

The Father's intellect sees in the Word the final answer to the problems that philosophy and theology do not even succeed in positing.

This is a kind of supreme intersubjectivity that grounds our own personal intersubjectivity, both horizontally (with other persons) and vertically (with God), for the very life of the Godhead "is not one of solitude but of communicativeness in the highest degree."

Our own spiritual birth "bears a faint resemblance to the eternal generation of the Son," and "is in its supernatural reality a reflection of the sonship of the Word." 

Which is plenty weird enough for me, since it is always already way beyond my own being.

Beyond-Being and Absolute Relativity

A reader asks:

If "infinity is a mode of each of the divine attributes and not a principle from which they are derived," does that not imply that the divine attributes themselves are somehow other than infinite? If so, what could conceivably be antecedent to that which is infinite?

Here I must attempt to read Garrigou-Lagrange's mind, and it's challenging enough to read his writing. However, it seems this touches on the two meanings of infinite mentioned in yesterday's post: yes, the divine attributes are "infinite perfections," but Schuon often uses infinite as synonymous with "All-possibility," that is, with the "radiation" of the Absolute into manifestation:

that is infinite which is not determined by any limiting factor and therefore does not end at any boundary; it is in the first place Potentiality or Possibility as such, and ipso facto the Possibility of things, hence Virtuality. Without All-Possibility, there would be neither Creator nor creation, neither Maya nor Samsara. 

Conversely, G-L very much wants to preserve the absolute freedom of the Absolute to create, whereas Schuon's quasi-emanationism makes it appear almost determined. 

G-L is in agreement with Schuon that "Goodness is essentially communicative; good is diffusive of itself," but he disagrees that God must necessarily create. However, it's unclear if he rejects this for metaphysical or for dogmatic reasons, for he writes that it is the Church that

rejects this doctrine which fails to recognize the absolute freedom of God's creative love and the gratuitous nature of the gifts we have received.

While not strictly necessary, G-L calls it fitting for God to have created us and the world. 

Me? I take an in-between stance, that the Creator must create, but not necessarily this creation, thus preserving both his essential freedom and essential creativity.

The same reader writes that

I’m not sure that Schuon considers Beyond Being to be a ‘separate reality’; rather, it is the highest dimension of the Absolute itself (of which Being is its first ‘auto-determination’, so to speak, and thus already ‘relative’ but not another reality altogether).

This "auto-determination" may go to the same issue just mentioned, i.e., the divine freedom. For example, G-L writes that

A free gift is the more precious according as it is more gratuitous and might as well not have been given. It demands the more gratitude in proportion as it is less due. 

If the creation is a free gift, then it makes no sense that being itself is a kind of compulsory emanation from Beyond-Being. 

As for what goes on beyond being, it seems this goes to the sufficient reason for revelation, for it

supplies what reason could never ascertain. In God [i.e., within the Trinity] there is a supreme and necessary outpouring of Himself. It is the impenetrable mystery of His intimate life and of His interior fecundity...

Note that there is "necessity" within the Godhead, the necessary outpouring of the Son from the Father; but putting it this way doesn't sound quite right, because the necessity must be a consequence of "absolute love," or something, so it's somehow both free and necessary. 

Schuon often compares infinitude to the rays of the sun, but G-L specifically uses that analogy to say what God is not like: 

The supreme Good does not communicate Himself outwardly by a sort of internal necessity, after the manner of the sun which illumines things. His loving goodness is absolutely free.  

What does Bob think? As they say, a philosophy is generally true in what it affirms but false in what it denies. Just because the Church disavows emanationism, this doesn't mean that there is no truth in emanationism. Being, for example, is "necessarily" good, but it doesn't mean this or that good is necessary, so we must still cultivate gratitude.

More from our reader: 

I think Schuon would agree with you that Being and Beyond Being are simply twin aspects of the Supreme Reality. It’s unfortunate that Schuon often uses the word ‘impersonal’ to characterize the latter, when he actually means ‘supra-personal’. As you’ve correctly pointed out on more than one occasion, the greater cannot derive from the lesser!

I guess it's okay for one to say "supra-personal" so long as one defines what it means. Problem is, we can conceive of nothing higher or prior to personhood -- something from which persons would be a mere entailment or potentiality. This is a Big Difference between Christianity and eastern philosophies, since (as seen in yesterday's chart) personhood belongs to maya, which is to say, appearances. 

It also belongs to relativity, which opens another can of wormholes, because I agree with Schuon that the principle of relativity must somehow be situated in divinas, I just disagree on exactly how. For Schuon, it is grounded in the principle that Being (and Person) is relative to Beyond Being.

However, I would anchor relativity in the Trinity, as in the Son being relative to the Father, and vice versa. Here I would even venture the orthoparadox that relativity is absolute. Indeed, for me, this is the ultimate principle of the Trinity, and why it must be revealed. 

We can easily arrive at the principle of God -- of the One -- by the light of natural reason. But the same reason could not arrive at the orthoparadoxical idea that God is substance-in-relation, such that relation is irreducible to anything more fundamental; although 3 is 1+1+1, there is no 1 prior to the relations between them. This idea is wild but definitely not wooly, and we'll be getting more deeply into it as we proceed. 

Seems like a logical place to stop and catch our breath. I try to keep it under 1,000 words...