The Chiasmus: The Created Supernatural and the Natural Divine (essay from 'You are Gods' by David Bentley Hart.
D.B.H. begins by finding in the natural order what might be
considered to be propaduetic to the divine.
In the Platonic and Aristotelian onto-epistemology there is a surpassing
of the apparent division between subject and object. It is in this that he comes close to the
non-duality of Advaita Vedanta which he admits as an influence which guides him
past the Natural/Supernatural dyad beloved by the Thomist manualists that he
impugns with all the scintillating nay coruscating invective that he commands. All good fun until someone loses an eye.
Jacques Maritain in his ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ :
“To admit in any degree whatsoever, even in simplest inchoative form, a genuine experience of the depths of God's being on the natural level would necessarily mean either to confuse our natural intellectuality (specified by being in general) with our intellectuality as it flows from grace and is specified by the Divine Essence itself; or to confuse the presence of God's immensity (whereby God is present in all things in virtue of his created efficiency) with His holy indwelling (whereby He is present in a special way, as object, in souls that are in the state of grace); or, again, to muddle up in the same hybrid concept, the wisdom of the natural order (metaphysical wisdom), and the infused gift of wisdom; or, finally, to attribute to the natural love of God what belongs exclusively to supernatural charity.”
As I mentioned Hart finds an entry point into complete
realisation of the divine through experience.
‘There is no other door to that awareness’ (Sankara)
In WWF terms regard me as the midget compadre that runs into
the ring and kicks the referee on the shin.
Hart begins as Aristotle does with the sense of wonder. Out
of that comes inquiry. I may as well
admit that he sends me to the dictionary betimes. What’s chiasmus? The general drift seems to be the repetition
of the general in the particular or something.
Anyways he begins with an advaitic note by a laying out of the aporetic:
“We are accustomed, here in modernity’s evening twilight, to conceive of our knowledge of the world principally as a regime of representation, according to which sensory intuitions are transformed into symbolic images by some kind of neurological and perceptual metabolism, and then subjected to whatever formal conceptual determinations our transcendental apperception and apparatus of perception might permit....
Knowledge, then, consists in no more than a kind of cognitive allegory of and logical deduction about Being, because Being in itself possesses an occult adversity or resistance to being known....
The more rational assumption, however, is that so implausible a liaison between absolutely incommensurable spheres of reality is impossible, and that in fact mind and world must belong to one another from the first, as flowing from and continuously participating in a single source that is at once ontological and gnoseological, and in which the ontological and the gnoseological are one and the same.”
Here Hart is moving towards an epistemology that is like
that of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra’s ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’. He calls it perceptuality/perceptability. What we know is the object itself as it is by
virtue of the mental modification/vritti or in Thomist terms the ‘conversio ad
phantasmata’(?).
“Only in the transcendence of form over the formed—whether the latter be a material substrate or the intentionality of the mind—can there be a place of true indistinction between the being of an object and the knowledge of that object. Only in form—only in the informing cause of both an object’s finite existence and the act of understanding that takes that object in— can the secret and most primordial impulse of all philosophy realize its end.”
Maritain denies the knowledge of God via connaturality to
those wholly dependent on the natural order.
Though that experience by mystics of Islam and Vedanta may be sublime it
suffers from the disability of being
stuck in the natural domain.
“There are Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, and other schools of mystics. But the mystical experience to which they lay claim does not proceed from theological faith. There must, therefore, be a natural mystical experience.”
Hart counters the two tier view on which this judgment is
based. The first sentences of this
citation is an objection:
“Surely the temporal is, from the perspective of the finite, contingent. But, from the perspective of the eternal life of God, God’s manifestation of himself to himself is never without his manifestation in creation, and so creation is eternally present within the eternal act whereby God is God.”
Where Hart causes the complaint ‘but this is pantheism’ arises
from utterances like this:
“ Our being in God and God’s being in us are both also and more originally God’s being as God”
“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”
Pantheism is an all-purpose dismissal which is never
analysed. Is it the atheistic pantheism
of Hegel or Spinoza or something else maybe a doctrine that the world is divine. To follow that through logically it would
mean the Cosmos was uncreated which is very like the ‘ajativada’ of Gaudapada (unborn). Hart uses a Trinitarian perspective, whereby
the Cosmos is an emanation from the boundless creativity of the Father. There is nothing necessary about creation but
the connection is through the unity of being.
“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”
Hart’s essay is of course ‘per speculum in aenigmate’. The ambhibological words which swim in two
oceans are used to advance his speculations.
Deep meditations here and natation outside the flags.
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