Darkness reflected in the mirror

It is not without some hesitation that I share my recent struggles. Don’t panic for me when you read this. I’m not crying out for help, and I’m in no danger – not any danger you aren’t in as well without knowing it. I want to try to make something of my journey available to others in a more personal, less 3rd person way. It’s easy to post the joyful moments, or to discuss the meaning of this or that doctrine or philosophical claim. It’s harder to climb up on the examination table and invite others to observe whatever sickness is working in you.

I have written a bit about the Void (here, here, and here). I’ll leave you to check those out if you wish. I don’t mean to sound like Morpheus, but the Void is everywhere. It’s all around you. It’s every place and occasion where we are confronted by the truth of our nothingness. Anyone can perceive it. It does not take an act of faith to see and experience it. It takes an act of faith to transcend it, and not everyone succeeds at transcending it. The Void is our absolute ontological poverty, and any experience can be an entry point into its realization.

Forgive me if I’m unable to narrate it for you, but in recent months the Void has been my new ‘internal’ address, its gaping maw beneath me like a spectral Dementor consuming every thought. The Void is existential bankruptcy, a foreclosure upon life’s promises from the inside out, where the difference between life and death is nominal and the two words name the same emptiness. I’ve been in dark places before, but always in sight of life’s light at the entrance of the cave, a light that illuminated the Void’s insides. The Void has imposed itself from without; now it emerged from within me. I want to call it a ‘presence’, but it’s more like the presence of absence, on the inside. Its depths immeasurable. Its appetite insatiable. Its silence absolute. The will to live evaporates.

Not long ago, unable to sleep, I rose and went to the living room sofa. I don’t how long I laid there praying the Jesus Prayer. Crying out groping for a reason to wish the world’s continuing existence, or mine in it. Hours perhaps. But they were empty words without any apparent effect. I went between the Jesus Prayer and repeating “I know my Father loves me” over and over, just out of habit. I don’t know if I was dreaming or if I was just awake but lost in the darkness of the experience. But I was suspended in pure darkness, utterly alone. I was embodied but couldn’t make out my own limbs. All I did was repeat the Jesus Prayer.

At some point the faintest light appeared at a great distance. I gravitated toward it. As I approached it, it took the shape of the Cross. When I say it was a light, I don’t mean it emanated its own light. Its light was different. As I got up to it, I saw it was simply a mirror, a cross-shaped mirror. It had no thickness at all. It was pure surface, in the shape of the Cross. I could make out the darkness all around it still. But there the cross-shaped mirror remained in front of me. I couldn’t look behind it, and I couldn’t turn my back to it. As I turned to move in a different direction, it maintained its position in front of me.

More amazingly, it was a mirror that reflected where I was. When I looked at it I saw myself and my surroundings reflected. To look at it was not to look through it or into it. Rather, it was to see all else by means of it. All I saw in it was myself and my surroundings. “But how’s a mirror reflect anything in the dark? That’s not possible.” Obviously. Stand in front your bathroom mirror at night and turn the light off. You see nothing. This was like that, except with the lights out the mirror still reflected clearly, perceivably, all that was there. “I’m in complete darkness here. I can’t touch anything and I’m not touched by anything. There is nothing in this Void with me. So whence the reflection?” But as I looked at this mirror, my own reflection and the reflection of the entirety of the space I was in became clearly perceivable, and what I saw was a beautiful, sunny day. Blue skies above, the birds I visit every day in my backyard, my garden flowers, my favorite chair, and a healthy looking me, a contented me, staring back from the reflection. It was my reflection to be sure, not a vision of me somewhere else, for if I moved, or raised my right hand, or stepped back or forward – all my movements were perfectly reflected in the mirror. But none of the despair of life I felt was in my reflected face that I viewed. If I looked slightly left or right of the mirror – all was a consuming blackness. The only thing to see, and the only way to see it, was to stare at the cross-shaped mirror. There was no viewing the world around me directly. Things were only perceivable when perceived indirectly as reflected in the Cross. So the light that came from the Cross which I saw from a distance was the sunlight of my own surroundings reflected in the Cross. The Cross was just telling me what was there.

This is the opposite of how we typically view the Cross. We can easily imagine our surrounding world with us, nature, and other people all fully present as our lived experience. Then we plant the Cross over top this vision, and it’s the Cross in this context that is a black and ugly thing, a cross-shaped horror which, you might say, introduces the Void into the real world. In this case you can get a moment’s distraction from the horror of the Cross by looking away to the real world around. My experience in the Void through this night was the opposite. My body, and the whole world I was apparently in, were a horror of darkness, a consuming Void, on their own, and it was the Cross that brought the world to light and relation.

I apparently fell asleep or into a deeper sleep at this point and woke up in the morning.

Finally, an inerrant text!

I can only admire it from a very great distance, but I would recognize this score from its opening measures without the title. Many years ago I decided I couldn’t go through life captivated by it but never having attempted it, so I did manage to work through the first third or so of Segovia’s arrangement of it for guitar. This is J. S. Bach’s Chaconne from Partita No. 2 for solo Violin (D minor), here performed by Jascha Heifetz, Paris, 1970. It’s said to be the most sublime piece of music ever composed. And while there are other pieces more technically challenging, there may be none more musically-interpretively challenging.

I’ve listened to many guitarists play it and dozens of violinists as well, altogether hundreds of times. I’ve felt the whole range of emotions while listening to it. It has inspired me to get off my bum and do something with my life. It has thrown me to the floor, convicted to tears for my failures and indiscretions. It has held me in my darkest hours and poured the grace of forgiveness into my broken life more often than I can say. I will even confess that it has saved my life a time or two.

Bach composed this work (1720, together with the other sonatas and partitas for solo violin) just after the death of his beloved wife Anna. One story about the composition (believed by many musicians but few Bach scholars) is that Bach’s elaborate use of the double stop (playing two notes at once) strewn throughout this piece was Bach’s way of retrieving Anna from the grave to rejoin him and unite her voice with his. True or not, the partitas are sublime, and the Chaconne is their summit.

Lost in translation—Part 2

“The golden thread of analogy can stretch across as vast an apophatic abyss as the modal disjunction between infinite and finite or the ontological disproportion between absolute and contingent can open before us; but it cannot span a total antithesis. When we use words like ‘good’, ‘just’, ‘love’ to name God, not as if they are mysteriously greater in meaning than when predicated of creatures, but instead as if they bear transparently opposite meanings, then we are saying nothing.” (David Bentley Hart, “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo.”)

I’d like to continue exploring questions related to theological language – how our language apprehends (or, as I prefer to say, is apprehended by) God. It’s a topic the currents of my own faith-journey circle me back round to with some regularity. I’ll continue my thoughts primarily in light of the earlier part of David Hart’s essay “The Offering of Names: Metaphysics, Nihilism, and Analogy,” which I’ve been reading and re-reading for the past few weeks. The essay is a call to remember the difference between “nomination” and “attribution,” that is, between the “theological enunciation of ‘divine names’,” on the one hand, and the “philosophical enumeration of the ‘attributes of deity’” on the other.

To begin with Hart’s description of the latter, a univocal ontology “understands being as nothing but the bare category of existence under which all substances (God no less than creatures) are severally placed.” It posits a “direct proportionate similitude between attributes inhering in discrete beings (albeit between finite and infinite instances,” which “allows the essences of our attributions to remain intact even when they are modified by the addition of the further attribute ‘infinite’.” In a metaphysics of participation, on the other hand, “all things are embraced in being as in the supereminent source of all their transcendental perfections.” This model asserts an “infinite qualitative difference between the coincidence in God’s simplicity and plenitude of all the transcendental moments that compose the creature (goodness, truth, beauty, unity, etc.) and the finite, multiplicit ‘prismation’ of being’s light in the creature.” This allows for “a continuity of eminence between those moments and the transcendent wellspring from which they flow,” a continuity which allows one to “in some sense name God from creatures” even though the “truth of such names is infinitely beyond the capacity of finite reason properly to grasp.” In this sense analogy, unlike univocal predication, is “a language of likeness chastened by the pious acknowledgement of an ever greater unlikeness.”

The danger inherent in attempting univocal predication, Hart argues, is that it necessarily commits one to a logical nonsense – i.e., God who is a “being among beings, who possesses the properties of his nature in a composite way,” a “mere supreme being, whose being and nature are in some sense distinct from one another,” who “receives his being from being as such,” and who “in some sense becomes the being he is by partaking of that prior unity (existence) that allows his nature to persist as that composite reality it is.” Such a univocal ontology fails properly to think “the difference between nomination and attribution.” It evacuates theology of transcendence, and plunges thought “into an absolute and self-sealing discourse of immanence” and finally nihilism. It seems to me that the notion of univocity operative in Hart’s critique is one in which terms used of God must mean everything they mean when describing us, i.e., no more and no less than what they mean when used of us, in which case the ontology in which love or goodness or justice is possessed by us is the ontology that grounds their manifestation in God. I agree this is disastrous.

A great deal more is said to clarify the distinction between these two ontologies and to argue why the later (metaphysics of participation) is Christianity’s genius transformation of its first world, but I’ll not get into that. It’s a wonderful essay. I’ll only embarrass myself as much as I have to here by wondering if there is not a slight equivocation hiding within Hart’s argument. To be precise, does not Hart end up agreeing that moral terms (like ‘love’, ‘goodness’, ‘justice’) mean pretty much what they mean when attributed to creatures? The term ‘love’, for example, names the self-giving pursuit of another’s highest good in God as opposed to seeking selfishly to harm or exploit others. That’s what it means for us to love. Semantically, that much is at least what it means for God to love us. To return to the opening quote of Hart, if we use the term of God as Hart advocates, “as if [it is] mysteriously greater in meaning than when predicated of creatures” [emphasis mine], I don’t see how the term ‘love’ is much different in meaning from the univocal sense – unless of course by ‘univocal’ one means to gather up everything about the contingent mode of becoming by which creatures know and experience love and attribute this to God, which obviously we do not want to do. Still, that being the case doesn’t result in ‘love’ becoming an empty notion. Even understood analogically, that is, ‘love’ doesn’t seem to come out meaning something other than what it means for us (taking into account the difference between God’s mode of being and our mode of becoming).

God loves us in an uncreated, non-composit mode of being, a mode that is, as Hart says, as qualitatively different as the difference between ‘truth’ and truths, or ‘goodness’ as such and particular instances of goodness. We, unlike God, love God and others in a created, composit, essentially temporal mode of becoming. But the term in question (love) in both cases describes the same selfless pursuit of the highest good of another. The infinite qualitative distinction prevents us from attributing precisely those features of the ontic (the “composite becoming” that “receives its life from outside itself”) that Hart points out cannot logically describe God, but ‘love’ doesn’t thereby change its meaning to hate, say, or to what have you. Why not? What prevents us from wondering whether love in God’s transcendence is not what we call hate or indifference? Most would answer by saying that’s simply not what the word ‘love’ means and would encourage us to find another word (‘hate’ or ‘indifference’).

If all that’s meant by analogy is that the terms we derive from our mode of becoming are understood both to be fulfilled and infinitely exceeded in God’s mode of being, I have no qualms. But I suspect more is meant, I’m just not sure what. I wouldn’t think one need insist that the word ‘univocal’ be abandoned (because it entails ontological commitments not even Scotus tolerated) and ‘analogy’ be substituted. It seems easy enough simply to ask the one doing the talking: Do you think God is a composite God of becoming whose nature is, like all created natures, an endless oscillation between essence and existence? If the answer is no – what other complaint have we?

It is not like Scotus’s disagreeing on the semantic nature of attribution (univocal vs analogical) included his believing God was in fact a composite God of temporal becoming who received his life from outside himself. Scotus was no Process theist or Evangelical. When he says being is to be understood univocally, at the very least he does not mean to say God and creatures alike are assumed under a third reality (being as such) as something other than God, superior to both God and creation and in which both participate. But if Scotus managed a univocal model of theological language in which God was not believed to be a composite being of temporal becoming who derived his life from something greater than himself, how is such a model necessarily beholden to the mistakes Hart warns us of?

It also does not appear to be the case that agreeing entirely with an ontology of participation means one always rightly names God. As Hart notes (“God, Creation, and Evil”):

[D]own the centuries, Christians have again and again subscribed to formulations of their faith that clearly reduce a host of cardinal Christian theological usages— most especially moral predicates like “good,” “merciful,” “just,” “benevolent,” “loving”—to utter equivocity, and by association the entire grammar of Christian belief to meaninglessness…Nor am I speaking of a few marginal, eccentric sects within Christian history; I mean the broad mainstream….

This is interesting, because if Scotus can affirm a univocal predication of, say, love or goodness, to God while knowing God not to be a composite God of temporal becoming who derives his life by participating in some independent being as such which is greater than him, and if many in “the broad mainstream” of classical theism who agree God is not such “a” being, though their equivocations also “reduce the entire grammar of Christian belief to meaninglessness,” then we have to wonder where the danger really lies. What really opens the door to the nihilism Hart warns of? I’m just asking. Certainly the actual belief that God is a composite God of becoming would invite that nihilism. But the latter equivocators (with the right ontology in hand) lead us to the same nihilism. So I’m wondering if there is some other mistake hiding in the details which has nothing to do with whether one explicitly affirms God’s transcendent ontological otherness.

I don’t mean to deny the difference between the perfectio significato (the thing signified) and the modus significandi (mode of signification). Yes, ‘love’ is attributed to God differently (as different as ‘being as such’ is from beings, or ‘truth as such’ is from truths, or ‘beauty as such’ from instances of beauty – all Hartian examples of that difference). My point is that the meaning of ‘love’ (semantically, not ontologically – if the distinction is permitted) is the same, i.e., we’re talking about desiring and pursuing the highest good of another in God (not about hating or fishing or sailing, or whatever random meaning the quantum-semantic wave might collapse us into). The how is not the worry people generally have. It’s whether when we talk about God our terms mean something transparently different or contradictory to what they mean within our experience.

A last thought. Just this morning I was pondering Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians (Eph 3). He prays “that you, being rooted and established in love, may have the power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Here is the intimacy of transcendency’s presence, not its absence, and yet its presence is no categorical reduction of God, for Paul prays (more literally) “that you know the knowledge-exceeding love of Christ.” Don’t miss the isomorphic affirmation/denial – what is in fact ‘known’ is in fact ‘beyond knowing’. One could throw in all one’s holdings (all one’s ‘categories’) on an ontological call to see what ‘in fact’ is hiding in love’s ‘knowledge-excelling’ hand, but one would lose everything in the wager. For surely here we have as explicit a description of the distance between cataphatic and apophatic, of the “epistemological caesura” one must tolerate between the two as one could ask for. And as long as it remains a propositional exchange, ‘toleration’ is what it will feel like, perhaps intoleration. But when it’s experienced (‘known’) as ‘knowledge-exceeding’ love (v. 19), toleration is transformed into the welcome sweetness of being’s inexhaustible goodness and we are, as Paul said, “filled unto all the fullness of God.”

Danish pastry anyone?

A second passage (after the first) from Christopher Ben Simpson’s The Way is the Truth: Kierkegaard’s Theologia Viatorum. It’s a great introduction to Kierkegaard’s vision. When it comes to understanding what faith is and what it means to integrate (“appropriate” is Kierkegaard’s word) the truth of the gospel into and as one’s very life, the nature of the obstacles that must be faced and the costs involved, Kierkegaard captures things best for us.

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Objective and Subjective Truth
The problem with what Kierkegaard calls ‘objectivity’ or ‘objective truth’ in relation to being a Christian is that it shifts the ‘medium’ from ‘existence and the ethical to the intellectual, the metaphysical, the imaginational’ (PoV 130). In making Christianity a matter of intellectual reflection, of abstract imagination, ‘a more or less theatrical relationship has been introduced between thinking Christianity and being a Christian’ (PoV 130). The problem with the ‘objective’ approach to the truth of Christianity is that it ignores existence in favour of something that happens on the level of reflection alone ‘as if having thought about something were identical with existing’, and so committing the error ‘that by coming to know objectively what Christianity is…one becomes a Christian’ 9CUP 253, 570, 577). The problem with ‘objectivity’ is that, in its abstraction and so isolation from existence, it is not in touch with actuality, not in relation to truth (EO 542). The reality that it has lost contact with is that of the existing person. Objectivity is a truth that ‘goes away from the subject’ (CUP 193) – a truth that is impersonal and indifferent: ‘indifferent to the individual’s particular condition…indifferent to its relation to him…indifferent to how the individual receives it…indifferent to whether the truth becomes a blessing or a ruination to him’ (FSE 39; EUD 233-4). A Christianity built around such ‘objective’ truth is a ‘professorial-scholarly Christianity’ in which ‘the professor is the true Christian’ (JFY 195); the problem is ‘not that what they say is an untruth, since they say what is true, but that true statement has no truth in them’ (UDVS 325) – they are ‘rich in truths and poor in virtues’ (EUD 350). When truth becomes ‘objective’, what is lost is the relation between the existing subject and what is seen to be true – the appropriation – ‘how an existing subject in concreto relates himself to the truth’ (CUP 75, 192-3)…

Subjective truth is a being in relation to, being involved in, the truth. ‘The relation of the subject’, Climacus writes, ‘is precisely the knotty difficulty’ (CUP 37). The subjective, for Kierkegaard, is the personal, is related ‘to a person present’ (FSE 39; UDVS 11). ‘Personal consciousness’, he writes, ‘requires that in my knowledge I also have knowledge of myself and my relation to my knowledge’ (CD 194). Central to this personal involvement is one’s decisions, one’s choices. Choice is, as Judge Vilhelm states, ‘decisive for a personality’s content’ (EO 482). An understanding of truth that includes decision as a necessary component is ‘subjective’, for ‘all decision is rooted in subjectivity’ and ‘only in subjectivity is there decision’ (CUP 33, 129, 203). In resolution one re-engages with actuality (after reflection). The choices one makes in relating to and engaging with the world constitute who one is as a person. Subjective truth is choosing to be in relation to what is. This implies that choosing rightly matters – that the content of the choice matters – for one’s life (EO 483). As deciding, choosing, actively relating to the world (to oneself, to others, to God) the thinking subject is involved in an ongoing process of existence as a continual striving (CUP 91-2)…

What Kierkegaard advocates is a movement from the ‘objective’ to the ‘subjective’, from reflection to resolution, from abstraction to action. One of Kierkegaard’s characteristic ways of describing this movement…is as appropriation. Appropriation is the movement of incarnating a truth that is not initially your own. It is a receiving that, as a genuine receiving, is a producing; appropriation…is literally: making something one’s own (CUP 21). In appropriation, a thesis, an objective truth to be known, becomes a task – ‘something quite different from knowing’ (CUP 297; JC 131) – or rather, the ethical and religious ‘theses’ are given their proper existential resonance as something more than propositions to be affirmed (JC 152-3). Subjective truth is then ‘the truth of appropriation’ where focus is brought upon ‘the subject’s acceptance of it’ such that, as Climacus famously writes, ‘when subjectivity is truth…a definition of truth [would then be this]: An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person’ (CUP 21, 129, 203)…

Christianity, Christian truth, is at the end of a trajectory that begins with subjective truth and ascends and focuses in ethical and religious truth. Given ‘that subjectivity, inwardness, is truth’, Climacus writes that this ‘at its maximum is Christianity’ (CUP 279). If ‘subjectivity is truth and subjectivity is the existing subjectivity, then, if I may put it this way, Christianity is a perfect fit’ (CUP 230). To truly exist humanly is to exist religiously, and to truly exist religiously is to exist Christianly (CUP 249)…Truth, then, as transcendent, as revealed, should be expected as something transcendent, as something from above challenging and frustrating our merely immanent categories here below, as something paradoxical. The trajectory does not lead to paradox or absurdity as such, to nonsense – as if one’s ‘subjective’ passion and earnestness is all that matters – ‘as a beatifying universal balm’. The trajectory points to a particular paradox…

Johannes Climacus writes in the Postscript: ‘The paradox came into existence through the relating of the eternal, essential truth to the existing person. Let us go further; let us assume that the eternal essential truth is itself a paradox’ (CUP 209). At the heart of Christianity is the paradox that ‘the eternal, essential truth…has come into existence in time’ (CUP 213). Christianity claims to present the eternal truth of human life – the truth of what we are and what we are to be – but this, Climacus writes, ‘is not an eternal truth in the sense of a mathematical or ontological theorem’; rather ‘Christianity is the paradoxical truth; it is the paradox that the eternal one came into existence in time’ – ‘the difficulty and the paradox are that it is actual’ (CUP 580; BoA 37).

This eternal truth come into existence is Christ – ‘Christ’s life upon earth, every moment of this life, was truth’ (PIC 203)…If Christ is this truth, the highest truth that is Christianity, is existing in the reality revealed in Christ. True human being, as living in community with God, with others, and with oneself, is a life ‘defined’ by Christ; it is the life of a disciple, an imitator of Christ…

Climacus presents the Christian way, Christian subjectivity as singular. ‘The appropriation by which a Christian is Christian’, he writes, ‘must be so specific that it cannot be confused with anything else (CUP 609); it is a ‘paradoxical inwardness that is specifically different from all other inwardness’ (CUP 610). The Christian way is based on Christ. Climacus holds that Christianity as paradoxical-religiousness is so unique that one, ‘just by describing the “how” of his inwardness can indirectly indicate that he is a Christian without mentioning Christ’s name’ for ‘this’ “how” fits only one object’ (CUP 613-14)…

And essential part of the particularly Christian understanding of truth for Kierkegaard – that the truth is ‘transcendent’, that it comes to us, from beyond us, in Christ – is our state as untruth. Untruth, for Kierkegaard, is the ordinary state for humans, is the ‘preceding state’ (EO 599; PF 13-14). While, for Christianity, subjectivity is truth, our subjectivity ‘at first’ is untruth (CUP 213)—that subjectivity is truth, Climacus states, ‘begins in which way: “Subjectivity is untruth”’ (CUP 207). This untruth is a state of isolation or estrangement – of not being in community, in communion with reality – ‘inclosed’ in one’s own false world, at a ‘painful distance from the truth’ (CA 128; CUP 269). One is self-deceived, not relating to what one is and the way things are as one is and as the way things are, in actuality (TDIO 35). One despairingly misrelates to the self either being tricked out of the self by becoming a finite thing bound to necessity without possibility of freedom (SUD 33) or by becoming something ‘fantastic’ (SUD 31), ‘a mirage’ (SUD 36) of infinite possibilities – lacking, not being constrained by actuality and so becoming unreal (SUD 35). This untruth is a despair, an unhappiness, that can manifest itself in a sense of disjunction, a sense that something is wrong with oneself. This despairing untruth, as Kierkegaard’s later pseudonym Anti-Climacus describes it in The Sickness Unto Death, is not willing to be the self that one is – or (what amounts to the same thing) willing to be a self one is not (SUD 52-3). This misrelation to the self is also a misrelation to God insofar as the self is fundamentally related to God – the self ‘is’ a set of relations with the relation to God being the most fundamental, as the power that establishes the self—as the one that made the self as it is an against which one rebels in rejecting oneself (SUD 60). The state of untruth is a loss of this God-relationship. As Climacus writes: ‘It is really the God-relationship that makes a human being into a human being, but this is what he would lack’ (CUP 244). It is being in a state of sin, or rebellion, of mutiny against God (CUP 208) – even to the extreme of the most self-conscious and willful misrelation to oneself in ‘demonic despair’ that, ‘in hatred toward existence…wills to be itself, wills to be itself in accordance with its misery (SUD 73).

Truth for Kierkegaard is a matter of being true to one’s being. The self has a reality that is independent of one’s thoughts and desires – ‘the self he is is a very definite something’, writes Anti-Climacus, ‘it remains itself from first to last;…it becomes neither more nor less than itself’ (SUD 36, 69). There is something that is ‘the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers’ (CUP 629-30). One can either affirm and enter into one’s nature, one’s actuality or deny it. Truth is a matter of being (becoming) true to the actuality, that one is, ‘the only actuality there is for an existing person’ (CUP 316). Because there is a reality to the self there is a standard for a proper relation to oneself. Thus Climacus writes: ‘That subjectivity, inwardness, is truth…but, please note, not every inwardness’ (CUP 282-3). One becomes true, becomes more fully actual, when one exists in relation to what one is. One’s being, one’s actuality, is that of an active relation, an ‘existing in’, and interestedness – a being-between, ‘an inter-esse’ (CUP 340, 314). ‘Subjectivity is truth; subjectivity is actuality’ when one subjectively lives in accord with (one enters into the actuality of) one’s actuality as a subject – which is itself a being-in-relation—and so becomes subjective, actual, true (CUP 343)…

The self, for Kierkegaard…is ‘a relation that relates itself to itself’ (SUD 13). As such, it is, among other things, a synthesis of the necessary and the possible. Anti-Climacus writes: ‘Insofar as it is itself, it is the necessary, and insofar as it has the task of becoming itself, it is a possibility’ (SUD 35). The necessary is the reality of the self, that cannot be otherwise – ‘the self he is is a very definite something, and thus the necessary’ (SUD 36). The necessary aspect of the self is ‘that place’ (SUD 36) that one is in which one becomes – chooses to relate to the self – possibly rightly, possibly wrongly. The possible is one’s possible relation to one’s necessary reality. With one’s reflective consciousness (with the ‘mirror of possibility’), one has freedom with regard to how one relates to oneself (SUD 37). Thus, one can ‘become lost in possibility’ (SUD 37) – one can conceive of and relate to oneself as other than one is (e.g. not in a fundamental relationship with God as one’s origin and end). The proper (possible) relation to one’s (necessary) self, the true relation is that of ‘taking possibility back into necessity’ – living as (for one could live otherwise) what one is – of ‘submit[ting] to the necessity in one’s life’, for this is what enables one to become a ‘concrete’ and actual self (as opposed to an unreal/illusory one) (SUD 36-7). By choosing the possible way of existing that is in accord with our necessary being, one becomes actual – thus, as Anti-Climacus writes, actuality is the unity of possibility and necessity’ (SUD 36)…

Kierkegaard sees the more profound ‘truth’ of human existence as a correspondence between one’s existing and one’s being – between one’s existence and one’s essence, perhaps (CUP 190-3). Truth is an honest – in ‘that your life expresses what you say’ (CD 167). It is a process of becoming sober – as Kierkegaard writes, ‘to come so close to oneself in one’s understanding , in one’s knowing, that all one’s understanding becomes action‘ (JFY 115). ‘Christianly understood’, the goal is ‘to be the truth’ – and this is achieved when the truth ‘becomes a life in me’ (PIC 205-6). The truth is incarnated in the way one lives. Bringing all of this together powerfully, Anti-Climacus writes that ‘to be the truth is the only true explanation of what truth is’ (PIC 205). I quote at length:

The being of truth is not the  direct redoubling of being in relation to thinking, which gives only thought-being, safeguards thinking against being a brain-figment that is not, guarantees validity to thinking, that what is thought it – that is, has validity. No, the being of truth is the redoubling of truth within yourself, within me, within him, that your life, my life, his life expresses he truth approximately in the striving for it, that your life, my life, his life is approximately the being of the truth in the striving for for it, just as the truth was in Christ a life, for he was the truth. (PIC 205)

This lived truth is its own best demonstration. Kierkegaard writes that ‘the highest a person is capable of is to make an eternal truth true, to make it true that it is true – by doing it, by being oneself the demonstration, by a life that perhaps will also be able to convince others’ (CD 98). Those who seek to show that Christianity is true in a purely intellectual manner are ‘busy in a strange way in the wrong place’ (CD 189) – for Christianity is to be true in life and should be shown forth as such, much in the  way that ‘the resolution of marriage is its own best recommendation’ (SLW 156). Christian ‘being true’ is a making manifest, a concrete showing, of the truth of Christianity in life.

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CA The Concept of Anxiety
CD Christian Discourses
CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
EO Either/Or
EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses
FSE For Self-Examination
JFY Judge for Yourself!
PoV The Point of View
SLW Stages on Life’s Way
SUD The Sickness Unto Death
TDIO Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions
UDVS Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits

Philosophy’s divestment

Western thought had attempted to rise from this superstitious subjugation to the world’s mere event: Plato and Aristotle, however imperfectly, were both shaken by that effulgent moment of wonder that can free reflection from here animal dread; perhaps the one could not quite transcend the dialectic of change and changeless essences, the other the dialectic of finite form and unrealized potency, nor either the still “sacrificial” economy of finitude, but both stood within the opening in Western thought that theology could transform into a genuine openness before the transcendent God. Still, Heidegger may be somewhat correct in seeing, even in this openness, the inauguration of Western reason’s long journey toward technological mastery as the highest ideal, toward instrumental control as the governing model of all truth, toward—in short—nihilism. Perhaps there truly was, precisely in the birth of philosophy as a self-conscious enterprise of rising above the ephemerality of the phenomena to take hold of their immutable premises, a turning away from the light toward the things it illuminated, a forgetfulness of being within philosophy’s very wakefulness to being. And perhaps in this fateful moment of inattention to the mystery of being’s event, the relentless search for being’s positive foundations commenced, and then proceeded along a path that, in the end, would arrive at the ruin of philosophic faith. All of this may be—indeed, in some obvious sense, in—quite true. But the Platonic eros for the beautiful, good, and true was also a longing for something more than mere “grounds”; it was a desire for being’s fullness, though one not yet able to understand being as gift. Other ancient schools of thought were generally less precocious in their advances toward Christian theology. Stoicism, for instance, however magnificent, humane, and sophisticated it was in its most developed forms, was still somewhat retrograde in this regard, and was bound to a vision of the cosmos as a fated economy of placement and displacement, and to a more transparently sacrificial cosmic mythology of eternally repeated ekpyroseis (the universe as an eternal sacrificial pyre); but Stoicism too was profoundly marked by philosophical wonder before the goodness and loveliness of cosmic and divine order. The syncretism of late antiquity may often have produced monstrosities of occult “wisdom” and grotesque aberrations of philosophy and religion alike, but in the case of the Platonic tradition it also made it possible for a philosopher like Plotinus to reflect upon the generosity of the good and the convertibility of the good and being, and thus press against the boundaries of the totality. But it was only when Christian thought arrived, and with it the doctrine of creation, that the totality was broken open and, for the first time ever, philosophy was granted a glimpse of being’s splendid strangeness within its very immediacy and gratuity.

With this “Christian interruption” of metaphysics, every principle of necessity was made subordinate to the higher principle of grace. Christian thought, then, in its long history of metaphysical speculation, far from constituting just another episode in the genealogy of nihilism, was in fact so profound a disruption of many of the most basic premises of philosophy, and so audacious a rescue of many of philosophy’s truths from the impotent embrace of mere metaphysical ambition, that it is doubtful yet that philosophy can grasp what has happened to it, or why now it cannot be anything but an ever more indignant and self-tormenting flight from that interruption. The language of creation—however much it may be parodied as a language regarding efficient causality and metaphysical “founding”—actually introduced into Western thought the radically new idea that an infinite freedom is the “principle” of the world’s being and so for the first time opened up the possibility of a genuine reflection upon the difference between being and beings. And the Christian understanding of God as Trinity, without need of the world for his determination as difference, relatedness, or manifestation, for the first time confronted Western thought with a genuine discourse of transcendence, of an ontological truth whose “identity” is not completed by any ontic order. The event of being is, for beings, a pure gift, into whose mysteries no scala naturae by itself can lead us. And if the world is not a manifestation of necessity, but of gratuity—even if it must necessarily reflect in its intrinsic orderliness and concinnity the goodness of its source—then philosophy may be able to grasp many things, but by its own power it can never attain to the source or end of things. If being is not bound to the dimensions prescribed for it by fate or the need for self-determination or the contumacity of a material substrate, then the misconstrual of the contingent for the necessary constitutes philosophy’s original error.

It is for this reason also that theology’s interruption of the “history of nihilism” was philosophy’s redemption, immeasurably deepening its openness to being and increasing the intensity of its highest eros. Within Christianity’s narrative, the world acquired a new glory; for all that it had been robbed of the imposing dignity of metaphysical necessity, it had been imbued with the still more extraordinary dignity of divine pleasure; the world had become an instance of what could only be called beauty—beauty of a kind more absolute and irreducible than any known to pagan Greek culture. A God whose very being is love, delight in the glory of his infinite Image, seen in the boundlessly lovely light of his Spirit, and whose works are then unnecessary but perfectly expressive signs of this delight, fashioned for his pleasure and for the gracious sharing of his joy with creatures for whom he had no need, is a God of beauty in the fullest imaginable sense In such a God, beauty and the infinite entirely coincide; the very life of God is one of, so to speak, infinite form; and when he creates, the difference between worldly beauty and the divine beauty it reflects subsists not in a dialectic between multiplicity and unity, composition and simplicity, shape and indeterminacy, but in the analogy between the determinate particularities of the world and that always greater, supereminent determinacy in which they participate. Thus it is that theology alone preserves and clarifies all of philosophy’s most enchanting prospects upon being: precisely by detaching them from the mythology of “grounds,” and by resituating them within the space of this peaceful analogical interval between divine and worldly being, within which space the sorrows of necessity enjoy no welcome Thus, for Christian thought, knowledge of the world is something to be achieved not just through a reconstruction of its “sufficient reason,” but through an obedience to glory, an orientation of the will toward the light of being and its gratuity; and so the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” (indeed, it is rational precisely because of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail), and thus cannot be known truly if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know, one must first love, and having known, one must finally delight; only this “corresponds” to the Trinitarian love and delight that creates. The truth of being is the whole of being, in its event, groundless, and so, in its every detail, revelatory of the light that grants it. In a strangely impoverished and negative way, Heidegger—the apostate from theology—almost understood this, but ultimately proved to be only a “metaphysician” after all. Then again, Heidegger, like Nietzsche, was unable to see that his own revolt against metaphysics was itself really nothing but a necessary moment in metaphysics’ recovery of itself from theology. Philosophy could not, after all, accept the gift Christian thought extended to it and remain what it had been—a science of mastery, an interrogation of the “ground”—but neither could it ignore Christianity’s transformation of its native terms: once the splendor of truth had been assumed into the Christian love of beauty, its philokalia, once the light of the world had been taken into the discourse of ontological analogy and divine transcendence, and once the difference between being and beings had entered thought and disrupted every attempt to “deduce” from the world its metaphysical identity, philosophy could not simply reassert itself as an independent project, but had to discover a new foundation. Philosophy, like a king in exile, would have to suffer the most extreme divestment and privation before it could reclaim its lost privileges. This is the true sense in which theology is part of the history of nihilism: it leaves nothing good behind in the philosopher’s hands; it plunders all of philosophy’s most powerful interpretive instruments for its own uses (despoiling the Egyptians, to use the classic metaphor), and so makes it necessary, in the aftermath of theology’s cultural influence, that philosophy advance itself every more openly as a struggle against the light, an ever more vehement refusal of the generosity of the given. If nihilism is indeed the hidden core or secret vocation of metaphysics, in the post-Christian age nothing but that core, that vocation, remains: and so it must become ever less hidden, ever less secret.

(From David Bentley Hart, “The Offering of Names: Metaphysics, Nihilism, and Analogy,” in The Hidden and the Manifest)

Desire that is ‘out of this world’

There is in all human beings a natural desire for beatitude, for a happiness so complete that the desire for it could not be satisfied by the contemplation of any God which reason alone could know, but only by the vision of God of a directness and immediacy which reason is absolutely powerless to achieve and of which it cannot even know the possibility. Therefore, what human beings naturally desire cannot be satisfied by what human beings can naturally know. If follows from this…that even that natural desire for God, which must be frustrated by the incompleteness of the contemplation of any naturally known God, cannot be known in its full character of frustration, except from the standpoint of faith. For it is only by faith that we can know of the possibility of that complete vision of God to which human reason fails to attain. Hence, the ‘noble genius’ of the pagan philosophers – of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Proclus – who did know God by reason, and who, as Thomas says, could experience only a ‘great anguish’ of frustration at reason’s limitedness, did not know the true nature even of their anguish, for they did not, and could not, know that goal of human desire and knowledge by the standard of which theirs fell short.

(Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God)

Not that Fear and Trembling

From Christopher Ben Simpson’s The Way is the Truth: Kierkegaard’s Theologia Viatorum, a summary of Kiekegaard’s thought. I’ve removed the Danish equivalents for certain words but kept his references (cf. the key at the end).

Religious Faith: The Double-Movement
Religious faith, for Kierkegaard, has the structure of a double-movement. This, as we have seen, is reflected in Kierkegaard’s mode of communication (PoV 6-9). The general schedule is one of a redoubling in which a given position ‘is first of all its opposite’ (JFY 98). There is first the negative then the positive, first renouncing and then receiving, first emptying and then filling, first death and then life.

The first moment, the first movement of the double-movement of faith, is a negative one – an initial ‘wounding’ that has, nevertheless, a constructive end (TDIO 9; EUD 130; UDVS 279). Throughout his authorship, Kierkegaard names this first negative moment, the ‘first element’ of faith, as ‘despair’ (CUP 225-6; SUD 78, 116). Despair, strangely, is a way forward – ‘a man’ true salvation’ – ‘a hidden trapdoor – to ascent’ (EO 522; CD 114). This first, negative movement is also described as ‘infinite resignation’ (FT 36-8, 46), such that one has ‘resigned everything infinitely’ (FT 40). This infinite resignation is the ‘movement of infinity’ whereby one negates, resigns, gives up the finite such that one is left with the infinite (FT 38) – whereby one ‘practic[es] the absolute relation or infinite through renunciation…of relative ends’ (CUP 431-2). Despair or infinite resignation is a benefit in that with them one renounces, abandons, gives up the finite, the lower, in favour of the infinite, for the higher (FT 18, 48) – one ‘renounce[s] the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity’ (FT 49) – one turns from Mammon to seek first the kingdom of God. With this, one gives up on all finite possibility. It is a ‘dying to’ – a ‘middle term’ in which one ‘die[s] to the world’, ‘’breaking…with that which he naturally has his life’ – and so has ‘emptied himself in the infinite (FSE 76; JFY 98; MLW 177, 214; FT 69). This renunciation, this despair extends to the whole personality (EO 515) – surrendering, losing, even hating the self (EO 522; SUD 67; MLW 335) – wresting away self-love in a movement of repentance that dies to the self and to the world (WL 17; FT 99, 101).

In all of the negation and giving up and ‘dying to’ of infinite resignation, one ends up affirming or choosing one thing: oneself ‘in one’s eternal validity’ as having an ‘eternal consciousness’ – as being in relation to the infinite, the eternal – as loving God alone (EO 515, 520; FT 46). After one renounces all that is finite one is left with God, with oneself before God – even if before God one is always in the wrong – even if in loving him one is nothing before him (EO 601-6; R 212). For such a one has renounced even being in the right; God is their only desire.

For Kierkegaard, the second movement of religious faith is that of ‘faith’. ‘Only when the individual has emptied himself in the infinite’, Johannes de Silentio writes, ‘only then has the point been reached where faith can break through’ (FT 69). After the either/or decision of infinite resignation – choosing the higher and dying to the lower – faith then returns to the lower, for ‘it is great to give up one’s desire, but it is greater to hold fast to it after having given it up; it is great to lay hold of the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up’ (FT 18). In the double-movement of faith one resigns the lower for the higher (in infinite resignation) and then regains the lower (in ‘faith’) – this is because the lower is nothing without the higher, for the lower only is in relation to the higher – one rightly renounces it as nothing (on its own, as self-existing) in the first movement.

This winning back of the finite that was lost and dead happens, as Johannes de Silentio (alone among the pseudonyms) writes, ‘by virtue of the absurd’ (FT 36, 40, 46-7, 115). This mans that faith makes an affirmation in the midst of despair – when there is no human possibility. It believes (notice de Silentio’s gloss) ‘by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible’ (FT 46). For, as Constantius writes, ‘when every thinkable human certainty and probability were impossible [and] from the point of view of immediacy, everything is lost’ one can come into relation to something other than the human frame of possibility, probability, certainty ‘thunderstorm’ (R 212). So are the movements of faith the ‘movements of finitude’ (FT 38) in which one comes to receive, to regain (as a ‘repetition’) the finite – to ‘receive everything’ (FT 49), ‘to grasp the whole temporal realm’ (FT 49), to affirm temporal actuality as divine gift. Faith (re)gains ‘everything’, the finite ‘whole and intact’ (CD 146; FT 37) – more fully whole and intact than before in the light of its divine origin – including one’s self ‘whole in every respect’ (CA 106) – regains these as a ‘new creation’ (FT 40).

With the second movement of religious faith, there is a teleological suspension – suspending one’s bonds to the lower and being suspended from the higher (as an inverted foundation, like a suspension bridge). As such a double-movement (negative and then positive) ordered to an end, faith is a foresight than anticipates an arrival, a joyous sight, a fuller understanding that is to come (FT 21, 52, 65). One lives, with divine assistance, in the light of a right relation to God and to oneself (MLW 215). In faith, the self ‘rests transparently’ in God (SUD 30, 49) and has learned ‘the proper self-love’ (WL 18). This life is one of security, comfort, harmony and joy (FT 40, 50; EUD 330).

As seen in the second movement above, the higher from the perspective of the lower is seen as absurd. Faith can only be thought, be understood, on the higher plane, in a theological frame. It is seen as ‘absurd’ because it does not fit within the comprehensive frame of the lower sphere – this is a signal that either I am right and this is wrong (the absurd if false) or I am wrong (my perspective is false). The one in the lower must endure the difficult, the trial, the either/or, the ‘absurd’ to attain the higher (and regain the lower) (FT 27). The lower (without faith) cannot understand the higher – it cannot ‘get a perspective’ (FT 33). The absurd is a negative sign that something cannot be narrated from a given perspective. This makes perfect sense from the perspective of the higher (FT 261-3). As Kierkegaard writes in an unpublished reply to a review of Fear and Trembling, the paradox marks a ‘higher rationality’: ‘When I believe, then assuredly neither faith nor the context of faith is absurd. Oh, no, no – but I understand very well that for the person who does not believe, faith and the content of faith are absurd’ (FT 262 sup).

________________________________

CA The Concept of Anxiety
CD Christian Discourses
CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
EO Either/Or
EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses
FT Fear and Trembling
FSE For Self-Examination
JFY Judge for Yourself!
MLW The Moment and Late Writings
PoV The Point of View
R Repetition
SUD The Sickness Unto Death
TDIO Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions
UDVS Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
WL Works of Love

Leap of faith

…Kierkegaard set forth…the “stages along life’s way”…. These stages appear throughout Kierkegaard’s dialectical writings and, though there are sometimes more than four, the most prominent designations are: the Aesthetic Stage, the Ethical Stage, Religiousness A, and Religiousness B. Since these stages are cumulative, the later stages include the features of the previous stages transformed by “the leap” that moves the individual from one stage to the next. Since the decisive turning point for Kierkegaard is between Religiousness A and Religiousness B (Christianity), we will focus this discussion on these two stages and “the leap of faith” that makes the transition from A to B.

Before proceeding further, we should remember that Kierkegaard’s dialectic…is not the Hegelian version in which thesis and antithesis move systematically into a synthesis of a higher order, including but transcending both foregoing thesis and antithesis. Kierkegaard recognizes the existential power of opposites in tension, but he insists that smooth transition to a high-order synthesis not only is a violation of the ontology of human nature, but is fundamentally contrary to Christianity. The opposites, in his view, must be held passionately in tension; indeed, authentic self-understanding short of faith—Religiousness A—consists in full recognition that the tension has broken and given way to a deep dichotomous condition which is pervasive throughout human nature. The French existentialists, such as J. P. Sartre and the early Camus, and to some extent the German philosopher Heidegger, have recognized the power of Kierkegaard’s claim and made this human anguish descriptive of all human existence. The French especially have elaborated the absurdity of existence (apart from Christ) very effectively. In and by itself, human existence is indeed absurd and full of despair. Even if one seeks an “eternal happiness” in this broken form of existence and posits a God, the only God that despair will allow is totally inaccessible. This aspect of Kierkegaard recognized in the early works of Barth led to Barth’s description of God as “wholly other.” Thus, for Kierkegaard, passionate unresolvable dialectical opposition is the given human condition. Furthermore, for one to become fully conscious of this condition before the radically inaccessible God generates the intense passion and profound humor of Religiousness A.

Only from the standpoint of this stage is the full import of the contradiction which the God-man poses for human nature evident. The contradiction is that, given the dialectical opposition between existence and eternity, it is a major offense to the anguish of this assumption that God, the eternal One, should take on the fullness of human nature and yet remain fully God. The offense is maximized when it is further claimed that this God-man not only exposes the dichotomy between eternity and existence (Religiousness A) as an ontological error about what it means to be human, but also proposes to bestow his nature upon the believer, if the believer would so choose or take “the leap of faith.” In Kierkegaard’s words, the contradiction is that one’s eternal blessedness in time may be based upon a relationship to something else in time that is simultaneously eternal.

Thus, for Kierkegaard, the fundamental issue in what it means to be human is drawn out clearly in the ultimate dichotomy between A and B. This issue is precisely the core of the relationship between human existence and the eternal when they are mutually distorting, as in despair (A), and when both are fully real and simultaneously present in a singular location (B). This later condition refers first to the historical singularity of the incarnation in Jesus Christ and, second, to the singularity of an individual when by faith the tensive unity between the existential and the eternal is restored.

(James Loder, The Knight’s Move, p. 92f)

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And this, friends, is the contradiction (which just is the space over which faith must leap) that open theists, while laying claim to a proposition about God’s ‘knowledge of the world’ which in itself is defensible and probably right, will not embrace, and in not embracing reject a far more consequential truth – the Christological nature (or better, the Christological content) of that contradiction which defines Christianity as faith. It is too “offensive” a leap (in the Kierkegaardian sense).

Christians in Westworld

I’m surprised to find myself this month involved in the same discussion with different people in separate venues. The topic is AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the theological/ethical implications of the emergence of conscious/self-aware robots. What would that say about what consciousness is? Would it be a de facto proof of what philosophers call the computational model of conscious (that all conscious states are reducible to non-conscious, pre-intentional, material processes in the brain)? What would AI say about what it means to be a human being? How would it effect our understanding of the image of God freely bestowed by God upon human beings?

Deep waters.

I want to share a reply I gave to one person who asked me about this. I’m floating this out for comments and am still in process myself. But I confess I don’t at all feel threatened by the possibility of computer’s achieving conscious states, though I agree with David Bentley Hart that it’s impossible. But I don’t know that one can demonstrate its impossibility the way one demonstrates that 2 + 3 = 4 and not 7, and so remove all rational grounds for doubt. My reply reads:

Back to your concern re: AI. I think you were especially concerned about ethics and epistemology – not knowing how to treat an instance of AI that was indistinguishable from a human being.

David Hart doesn’t think conscious/self-aware AI is achievable. Whatever complex forms of (so-called) behavior computers are able to achieve, it never rises to the level of conscious self-awareness. We’ve talked about Hart’s reasons. I agree with him. And for the sake of argument, let’s say Hart is right. But let’s also say we can’t know he’s right, i.e. we can’t absolutely foreclose upon the possibility that he’s wrong. And let’s also assume technology is able to produce robots who simulate the conscious experience of human beings. I’m just thinking out loud.

So – back to your question. What dilemmas does this present us with? Let’s imagine the worst – let’s go with full-on Cylons who can copulate with human beings and bear half-breed children. I want to explore one possible answer, and that answer is: So what? Given a Christian worldview, God is transcendent and life-affirming. Why can’t we be unconditionally life-affirming in whatever circumstances we find ourselves given our limitations and ignorance?

Even in circumstances where we know we’re relating to what is other than human, we still ‘care’, ‘love’, and ‘converse’ in some measure. My cat Sheba is all over me right now. I talk to her. I ask her questions: Ya hungry? How was your day? Feeling OK? Wanna play? We all engage our pets on this level. But what are we doing? It’s like part of being human is the desire to humanize everything. And not just sentient creatures like Sheba. I also talk to the fruit trees and flowers I plant whenever I water then (in a St. Francis sort of way!) Am I insane? Don’t think so. We could get into the details and ask at one point does addressing and showing kindness to less than human conversation partners become enmeshed with recognizing and conversing with God who is present in all things sustaining them, but that wouldn’t itself answer our question.

So if we possess a worldview that is life-affirming and benevolent to all life forms – what’s the problem with us making room for Cylons? Will God fault us for being more generous than he is? Will he fault us for extending relations to life-forms that do not in fact engage us on the deepest metaphysical level which only God can discern? Is that kind of misrelation a devaluation of things? To be indifferent and cruel to lesser beings (however we view that) is still inhumane.

There may be a hidden contradiction in this scenario. Assuming Hart is correct but we can’t prove it, and assuming we can inter-breed with Cylons and bear a new species of intelligent being – what would the status of my half-breed kids be to God? I mean, do I get to heaven someday only to discover that my Cylon wife and half-breed kids literally ‘no longer exist’ since they were just batteries in great packaging? What if I didn’t know my wife was a Cylon who didn’t qualify? That would be a total bummer – because it would mean a huge part of my loving and giving essentially disappears and is unredeemed by God. Relations that constituted my life’s joys end up not being a part of my continuing story with God. That would suck. But (for the sake of argument) it would only suck because I thought it was something else. So here I want to explore the answer: So what? What fault is there in assuming the highest and best of whatever ‘other’ is before me, an ‘other’ whose deepest irreducible teleology I’m incapable of discerning?

Again, I’m just thinking out loud. I don’t think debates over the possibility of AI are beside the point. I’m just wondering what we could discover about the possibility if we approached it by assuming it was true then going from there. Would we not be able to live in the present moment and offer unconditional love, to whomever or whatever, in the best and highest mode of expression that we are capable of?

I’m not sure I see a problem here. If Cylons really are possible, so be it. It wouldn’t disprove the existence of God. But if we imagine God unable to handle Cylons were they to come along, we’re imaging a non-existent God, not the transcendent ground of all being who is able to weave together whatever our technologies throw at him and do so without tragic remainder. Remember, God is the summum bonum, the highest good and greatest beatitude and as such the end/telos of all things. So whatever comes to be is possible, and whatever being is possible derives its possibility from God. If Westworld is possible (since we’re imagining it so for the sake of argument), then God would be God in Westworld just like he is in ours,  for there is no imagining ourselves outside the transcendent reach and goodness of God, no conceivable world in which I could find myself unable to relate to myself and the world around me in ways that reflect the life-affirming goodness and grace of God. If that world happens to include AI, so what?

The nearness of God is my good

I was listening to Dallas Willard this last week and the way he quoted Ps 73.28 sent me off to check out a few things. The relevant phrase is: “The nearness of God is my good.” I checked a few English translations:

KJV: “It is good for me to draw near to God.”
NIV: “It is good to be near God.
NLT: “How good it is to be near God!”
RSV: “It is good to be near God.”
TLB: “I get as close to him as I can!”

Is it that my drawing near to God is good for me, or is it the fact of God’s abiding presence, his nearness, which is my good? Other translations go with the latter:

YLT (Young’s Literal Translation): “Nearness of God to me is good.”
HCS (Holman Christian Standard): “God’s presence is my good.”
NAS (New American Standard): “The nearness of God is my good.”
ISV (International Standard Version): “How good for me it is that God is near!”
JPS (Jewish Publication Society): “The nearness of God is my good.”

The Hebrew is straightforward (lit., “And I [or “And as for me”] God’s nearness [is] to me good”).

ואני קרבת אלהים לי טוב

The relevant words are qi-ră-ḇaṯ ‘ĕ-lō-hîm (God’s nearness), a construct state of the noun “nearness” followed by “God.” There is no word for “of” in Hebrew (and no –’s to indicate possession). The relationship is generated by juxtaposing nouns, the first without the definite article and the second with it, or at least the second definite by virtue of identity as is the case with “God.” For example, “house” followed by “the king” is “The King’s house” or “book” followed immediately by “Tom” communicates “Tom’s book.” Here we simply have “nearness” followed by “God,” and it’s important to note that there is nothing in the noun “nearness” that suggests that our “drawing near to God” is meant. On the contrary, when movement toward an object is described, one typically finds the verb form followed by a preposition “to” (e.g., Gen 20.24, “But Abimelech did not come near to her” or Zeph 3.2, “She did not draw near to God” and many other examples which all include a preposition in Hebrew). But in Ps 73 we have simply the noun “nearness” in construct state with “God.” The nearness here is God’s nearness to me, his presence to/with me. That presence is the assumption, and its abiding truth is my good. The first translations above miss this point, I suggest, and assume the Psalmist is describing his drawing near to God.

I am not suggesting that since God is always immediately present there’s no sense in which we can intelligibly speak of our drawing near to God. On the contrary, even though we are inseparable from the immediate reality of God’s presence, we are not consistently aware of it. We must learn to realize its truth and live in its fullness. Anyone who consistently lifts their thought Godward knows it takes an investment of self-denying effort to awaken the mind to God’s presence. We draw near to God, move toward God, in the sense that we exercise our awareness, through contemplation, of God. But these efforts only seek to realize the truth of God’s abiding presence. There is no distance (metaphysical or otherwise) that is spanned. We do not close any real gap between ourselves and God when we draw near to God. In still other words, the only way to see God is to see him seeing you.

As important as it is, our part is not the point of Ps 73.28. Here we are encouraged to name the good we contemplate, not our efforts to realize it. God is already here, already present. His “nearness” is not something my moving in the right direction “achieves.” Only if this is kept in view do we make healthy (transformational) sense of what we do in “drawing near” to realize the truth of God’s abiding presence.