I was recently told: “The Gods of logic have spoken.” “No!” I responded. If it is logical it is not divine.
A God is divine in being creative. .Logic does not apply.[i] One may look upon the work of creativity and analyze it according to a logic, but creativity itself defies logic. Creativity is art in its transcendence of logic. Logic belongs to the creature in its creatureliness. It is a tool to navigate creation. It is the tool we use to organize the world. Logic makes for law and order. As it is a human endeavour, it is susceptible to a flaw–the definition of terms. The parameters put upon each term in a logical equation always suffer the uncertainty of both individual rational understanding and individual psychological nuance. Thus, the product of logic is never a perfection. It never makes for a perfect order. It makes an order susceptible to continuous investigation, explanation, and expanding parameters of understanding.
The order of logic makes this world, the world we ever attempt to make a viable harmony of ideas and societies. Creativity saves this world. It saves it because only creativity can dream, imagine, play, soar, inspire. Creativity can dare the void when logic can no more than examine it. Logic tells us a stick is a stick. Creativity turns it into a wand, a cane, a sceptre, a baluster, a post, a picket, a baton, a truncheon. Yes, creativity has a dark side. Shiva does not exist without Parvati, Dionysius without Apollo, the wrath of Yahweh without his mercy. Logic bucks at this dichotomy. Where creativity sees in the darkness a call to find the greater depth and scope of creativity, logic can see only discomfort, disruption, disorientation, evil. Logic does not want a stick with a knot or a twist. Creativity understands the power in a burl, a curve. Creativity knows the value of the dark night, of desolation, of doubt. It knows they are punctuations in the dialogue of the soul evoking the soul to await, to discover, the fuller form of the sentence of life.
This is neither psychological speculation nor aesthetical theory. We live a time wherein logic is failing us. The order of logic is failing us. The definitions of terms that once held logical arguments in some tight frame are fading. The social understandings of terms is weakening. Every individual feels entitled to define the terms of social connectivity. Increasingly many want no more then their own definitions to apply to all. We, thus, are inundated with blind egos and ids[ii] bent on a world according to no logic, merely individual want. We are made to suffer fallacious “in-formation” bursting to form everyone and everything according to the notions of some one ego. It is infantile, and it is stupid. It is stupid because it is neither creative nor logical. Were it logical it would understand the embracingly social nature of the world we share. It would not want to make over the world in the image and desires of one’s own ego and id. It would be sympathetic to the whole of society, to the wellbeing of the whole of society, the whole of world, of nature. Were it creative it would instinctively see the difference between an ego’s vision and the artistry of creativity which is–by its very nature– incapable of promoting or aggrandizing an ego. Creativity transcends the personal in its every aspect.[iii] It is cosmic in scope. It is—in this world—social, socializing, and in contrariety to ego and id.
Around this world stressed by the growth of informational options, by ego-spawned delusions and distortions of reality, by the pressings demands of evolution for social and environmental integration, by the shifting anxieties of world powers, too many, both high and low, run to the comfort of their wee egos and opine they have discovered truth. They sink into the gravity of their puffed-up egos and their frantically stirred-up ids and believe they have grasped creativity and propriety. They stomp madly like depraved children. They shout from the tops of roofs and tanks. They stand in foul-most error. They threaten not only logic but the capacities of creativity.[iv] They are a danger. They are infants armed with voice, with power, with allowance. Who dares scold? In this world wherein everyone seems invited to play Master, what God with hurls of lightening is there to stop the madness of blind emotion and impulse? What Lord thunders into silence the unbridled, untrained, unthinking want of these manque Titans? What Sacred Source spins creativity out that logic might once again serve?
Every want of ego that has as its subtext “my way or the highway” is a sin against the creativity graciously set at the heart of us each, a sin against the logic of our forged and shared societies, a sin against this singular world we share. As the holy season of Lent approaches there ought to be in sacred spaces around this globe no shortage of souls sitting in sackcloth and ashes, no sparsity of hearts shrived, no wanting of tears to wash away the follies of heart, head, and hand. Yet how many will show forth the courage with Gerontius the penance of our repentance to thus profess:
“Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be…
There I will sing and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne’re can cease
To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest
Of its Sole Peace.”[v]
[i] It is to be noted that in the unfolding of the discussion of God and soul in this forum the indefinable sacred source of all that is, the Creator, in the effort to make relevant that name to the modern ear, has been referenced as Creativity or Creativity Itself. The abiding imprint of that Creativity is the inherent creativity of nature. In the terms of spirituality, that creativity is the divine providential presence and grace set in the very depths of soul, of life.
As regards the transcendence of creativity above rationality with its want to compartmentalize all things into logically self-contained boxes, the sacred texts from around the world are ripe with the apprehension that, as the Hebrew scriptures summarily put it, “My ways are not thy ways.” It is, however, in the Gospel according to Matthew that we are encountered with that insight in the blunt eloquence of a parable: “There once was an owner of a vineyard…” (chapter 20).
[ii] Varied schools of modern psychology give to the ideas of ego and id differing nuances of definition. Herein ego is used to denote an enclosed “me” and id as the blind pulse for the sustenance of that “me.” Both ignore the pulse to the integrity of self as a social being in the world. They may be considered to stand opposite the thrust of selfhood and spirit. While self and spirit radiate life, ego and id—in their rapaciousness—consume life. They ignore the reality of the world to satisfy a world vision centered on the “me” of a here and now. While they are powers essential to the evolutionary dialogue of psyche, they are wont to impede the luminous emergence of psyche into selfhood and spirit. They are not so much a darkness within psyche as a miserly and lethargic blindness to the expanse of reality. Their want for stability thwarts the emergence of self-consciousness, world-consciousness, wisdom.
[iii] Thus is the God of Christianity envisioned as a society—a community of persons with but one Self.
[iv] Is this not the core meaning of: “Wheresoever there is a carcass, there shall the vultures gather”?
[v] John Henry Newman: The Dream of Gerontius