Putting the Kosmos in the Cosmos

Good book: St. Thomas Aquinas Volume 2: Spiritual Master, by Jean-Pierre Torell (https://www.amazon.com/Saint-Thomas-Aquinas-Vol-Spiritual/dp/0813213169/ref=sr_1_3?crid=36K6KQ0JMLM2R&keywords=jean+pierre+torrell&qid=1678037835&s=books&sprefix=jean+pierre+torrell%2Cstripbooks%2C160&sr=1-3).

I'm going to first highlight some passages that, it seems to me, indicate a way to reconcile Christianity with the primordial and perennial metaphysics of Schuon. 

The passages below are yoinked from chapter III, God and the World, and illuminate Aquinas' Sphinx-like teachings on "God's presence in the world, and the world's presence in God," in "a circular movement of creatures who have come forth from him and are led back to their origin, now viewed as their final end." 

The Big Circle of the Creator mirrors the lil' circle of creation; come to think of it, it puts the kosmos in the cosmos, i.e., the order in the ordered.

In the exit of creatures from the First Principle, we observe a kind of circular movement owing to the fact that all things return as their end to that from which they came forth as their Beginning....

Now, as we have already said, since the procession of persons is the explicative reason for the production of creatures by the First Principle, this same procession is therefore also the ratio for their return to the end.

The second paragraph in particular made my eyes perk up and my ears bug out, because it suggests that the vertical circle of creation is indeed a distant exterior reflection of what goes on inside the Trinity: not just As above so below, but As inside so outside, so to (or three) speak.

There's much more, but before proceeding any further, this might be a good place to bring Schuon back into the discussion. As mentioned a couple of posts ago, I'm always fooling around with one or another of his books, most recently his penultimate one, The Play of Masks. 

One might say that Schuon wrote in a fractal manner, such that nearly every book mirrors the whole doctrine, and this one is no exception, except it's even more compact than usual, coming in at just 90 pages and earning an adamantine 10 on the Mohs scale of hardness.

About the curious fractal structure of Schuon's corpus, he adverts to it in the Foreword without using the word: "the chapters are small independent treatises which often summarize the entire doctrine"; the whole is right there in the parts, so to speak, and vice versa. 

I suspect something similar is going one in my output, which is why, as mentioned a couple of posts back, I can no longer communicate to a general audience unfamiliar with the past 17.5 years of blah-blah-blogging. 

Let us flip to p. 55, to an essay called Delineations of Original Sin, and try to relate it to what Torrell says above about the Up and In of the Trinity and the Down & Out of creation.  

Vis a vis "sin," which is another word for "separation from the Principle," Schuon says that we might distinguish it from guilt per se -- after all, original sin doesn't involve any action on our part, but rather, is an echo of the rupture of man's of original justification -- and pay heed to 

the presence in our soul of a tendency of "outwardness" and "horizontality," which constitutes, if not original sin properly so called, at least a hereditary [in the vertical sense]  vice that is derived therefrom.

Our existence takes place within the complementary poles of vertical and horizontal, inward and outward, "Kingdom of God" and thingdom of materiality. 

Perhaps we should emphasize at this juncture that we're not talking about a Gnostic or Manichaean rejection of materiality, rather, its divinization, ultimately via the Incarnation that facilitates our return to the Principle (which Torrell discusses, and more on which as we proceed).

"To be 'horizontal," writes Schuon, "is to love only terrestrial life to the detriment of the ascending and celestial path"; it is "to be 'exteriorized'" and "to love only outer things, to the detriment of moral and spiritual values." 

It constitutes a, or better, the, "sin against transcendence," because "it is to forget God and consequently the meaning of life." This "outwardness is to sin against immanence, thus it is to forget our immortal soul and consequently its vocation.... [And] this neglect predisposes to the indefinite repetition of the original transgression."

So, speaking of fractals, it is as if the flight to horizontality and exteriorization, both in general and in its particular manifestation, is a more or less distant echo of the fall.

Back now to Torrell, who situates the Principle of Creation in the generation of the Son from the Father:

this intra-Trinitarian procession, which is perfect, must also be the cause and explanatory reason for the procession of creatures as well.

I agree, but what went wrong down here? Who goofed? And what can we do about it?  

To be continued....