The following passing comment by Schuon caught my eye. It is in the context of a discussion of how the Pure Absolute necessarily takes on this or that form in a particular religion.
I say "necessarily" because I don't see a loophole here, as comforting as it might be to believe one's own religion is the Pure Absolute. But even St. Thomas cautioned against this, what with his radical apophaticism. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he did say this:
This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.
Having said that, I don't think such an esoteric doctrine is appropriate for all and sundry. Rather, only for the pneumatic weirdo type discussed in yesterday's post, the "man-center" who is "determined by the intellect" as opposed to the "man-periphery, who is more or less accident."
And by no means is Schuon trying to downgrade the practice of religion. I myself only practice one because Schuon says I must. And no, this doesn't mean that I only do so based on his authority. Not at all. Rather, it is because I see and understand his point entirely. I'm not a cultist.
Ultimately it has to do with that distinction between the Pure Absolute, AKA Beyond-Being, and Being. Again, this is the First Line, and once seen it cannot be unseen, at least by me. For me it literally makes perfect nonsense, except now it is up to me to situate the "perfect sense" of religion into this necessary context.
In practical terms it means I must situate Catholicism in this "deeper" context, which is bound to clash with anyone who thinks that Catholicism is already literally the deepest context.
Well, the latter is also correct, so long as we're talking about the Being side of things. I've mentioned before that the deepest structure of deep structures must be a kind of eternally dynamic perichoresis between Beyond-Being and Being.
I've also said that I suspect the Trinity is revealed to us precisely in order to help us get a handle on this deeeeep structure. I don't recall ever devoting an entire post to this subject, because I don't know that I've ever thought it through completely, nor if it is even entirely thinkable; surely not, although we can try, can we not?
For Christians the Trinity is revealed to us in the form of "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit." At the same time, however, there is nothing about any Trinity per se in scripture, rather, it is something the early fathers had to piece together and infer from various clues left to us.
The bottom and/or top line for us is that Ultimate Reality is at once radically one and more than one -- not quantitatively, of course, but qualitatively.
I like to pull back and open the aperture of our lens as wide as humanly possible, to an f-stop of, say, plus or minus 1/∞, in order to allow for the maximum light. But apparently there are tradeoffs, because we also want the sharpest possible image and the greatest depth of field. Where is Robin Starfish when you need him?
Maybe the photography analogy is no good. Obviously it's a motion picture.
Is it obvious?
Good point. Is God -- or the Ultimate Real, AKA O -- really immutable? Or does O change? Or both -- even though that would seem to violate the law of noncontradiction?
In my opinion we have to say "both." Moreover, I believe this must be one of points of the revelation of the Trinity, since... there are many ways to put it, but the Son is always returning to the Father via the Spirit, and the number 3 itself implies the return to Unity... if I can find the reference... something to the effect that if 1 is Unity and Principle, 2 is duality and Manifestation, so 3 is the return to the Principle.
My blood sugar is a tad low at the moment, but I do vaguely recall an old post touching on the idea of considering the Father as a way of talking about "Beyond-Being" and the Son as "Being." By no means is this a perfect analogy, nor can it be perfectly harmonized with Christian metaphysics... unless we consider Beyond-Being and Being not as a duality, but indeed an always dynamic tri-complementarity. Then I think it works, at least if your blood sugar is low enough.
Let's consider the following passage by Schuon, and see if we can't tweak it a bit:
The “Father” is God as such, that is as metacosm; the “Son” is God insofar as He manifests Himself in the world, hence in the macrocosm; and the “Holy Spirit” is God insofar as He manifests Himself in the soul, hence in the microcosm.
That is a fruitful way of looking at it, but I doubt Schuon ever thought or even knew about fractals, and I believe that if we think of the Trinity as a single substance fractally organized, this helps us to grasp the idea that Being is always dialectically related to Beyond-Being, and vice versa. But it's not a dualistic photograph, rather, a trialistic motion picture.
Elsewhere Schuon writes that
The vertical perspective -- Beyond-Being, Being, Existence -- envisages the hypostases as “descending” from Unity or from the Absolute -- or from the Essence it could be said -- which means that it envisages the degrees of Reality.
Except that Christianity specifically rules out such an emanationist metaphysic. Rather, it would horizontalize this scheme and say that all three are always involved as coequal branches of divine government.
I'm just about out of time, and I never even got to the passage mentioned in the first paragraph, which was that "to change one's religion is to change planets." Moreover, I had intended to write of how this applies to contemporary politics, i.e., what planet the left is from. It'll have to wait...
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