A young man, recounting to me his university years, explained that he had initially taken some courses in philosophy and theology but, finding them nebulous, opted to embrace a career in a field of intellectual surety, in science. Internally I was bubbling to interrogate beginning with: explain “surety”!
Ptolemy had a working theory of the heavens and, despite its complexity, it thrived for centuries until Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton rendered it fiction. Democritus told us the atom was the fundamental unit, and the theory held for two and a half millennia. Einstein thought he was on the cusp of deciphering the heart-beat of the universe when some tiny quanta threw him back his curve-ball. The celebrated Professor Hawking has been quite certain a number of times, until he decided he was not certain, and recanted. Is everything strings, or loops, or chaos? How many dimensions are there to the cosmos? How much of the cosmos are we–in even our most scrutinizing survey—capable of deciphering? Are black holes the end of the line or a new big-bang in gestation? Will deciphering dark matter solve all the unanswered questions, or merely open a trove of more questions? Is the hypothesis of dark matter itself valid or merely a modern form of deus ex machina? Is the cosmos infinite? Will it collapse upon itself? Will it continue out forever? Is the universe eternal? Is there a cyclical coming and going of the universe? Are beginning and end relative terms in a loop of turns? There exist a thousand more such questions, and matters are no less complete or certain in biology, ecology, anatomy, physiology, or any other science. Mathematics may seems irrefutable, but is not the like of xx=3(xx)-2(xx) not a tautology? Is not even the most complex of equations a pivoting of ideas about an “equals” mark, a synonym encoded to allow the implicit to become explicit, to intellectually decode the code of nature? All our endeavours, regardless of their complexity or erudition, stand ever incomplete, ever uncovering one more layer, one more nuance, one more frontier. Every time we seemingly reach a plateau, a plane of understanding, it either lacks some minute bit of information that forces us to scurry for a hypothetical infill, or it causes everything to collapse and confront us with some dark hole, some befuddlement, some cloud of unknowing.
We are surface dwellers, accustomed to proceeding superficially in politics, religion, sexuality, etc. Only the Whole can claim subliminality, a below the surface, the base on which reality rests, the goal toward which it pulses as it seeks its futurity, its secret of essential endurance, its beginning and end, its “as it was in the beginning, so shall it be without end”. We esteem knowledge as the medium wherein we thrive. That is a superficial truth, for below, before, and within knowledge resides faith; we acquire knowledge on the basis of a belief that we can find the answers to our questions, that we can find the means to succeed in being, and being happy and whole. We endure in questing on, and finite, sensitive, emotive, and cognitive conglomerates that we are, we press on hypothesizing seemingly without end—perpetuating therein the texture of those evasive visions of cosmic and personal endurance: infinity, eternity, immortality.
This series has been an endeavour to view the sundry ways in which the greatest holophrastic terms in the world—God and soul–have been understood and enunciated in occidental thought. Those understandings and enunciations have in large part been contingent upon epistemologies and metaphysics, the theories of how we know things and how things are constructed.
We have looked upon varied incarnations of idealism, rationalism, realism, empiricism, existentialism, and pragmatism. We have reviewed the “enlightened” appeal to the non-existent “common” sense. While each of these holds a truth relative to the perspective taken, each suffers a fate worse than that of Schrödinger’s boxed-up cat. Each presumes all men would be best served to avouch the one, reasonable, and correct perspective—the sensible and “common”! We have considered the dual usage of “to be”, its abstract use to express existence, and is concrete use to express a state within existence.
Does mind place forms on non-mind? If it does so, does it do so as a part or as a co-relative of non-mind? Does the mind impose a structure on the world through forms contained within the mind? If so, are such forms extrinsic to the individual mind? Are they eternal forms, objective forms? Is mind a something “above” the physical world? If this is so, does that make the physical world something lesser to mind? Is mind simply another aspect of the physical world, an aspect of materiality, a something arising out of the material? Does the mind filter the information from the senses and make a trustworthy picture of the world? In what manner may mind be held as reliably reflective of the structure of reality? Can we speak of things as known intuitively, as taken into mind in some subliminal, some primitive, some pre-conscious, some proto-cognitive manner? Can we know that which cannot be “sensed”, and if we can, how, in what manner, may we speak of such “non-sensed” items—analogically [indicating a variability of direction around the “word”], metaphorically [indicating an aura radiating around the “form” rather than the form itself], symbolically [indicating a transcendence radiating out of the “word”]?
Does the term “god” indicate Being-itself, a Being, a being, a totality, a process, a platform out of which or upon which being arises, a force within being? Does it denote the eternal forms of good, truth, beauty? Does it reference the primal cause, creativity, the animating intensity of the telos, the end point, the final cause? Is God the channel through which creativity is manifest, or in the traditional terms of theology, is God the being through whom the Word goes forth? Again, are we speaking here symbolically, metaphorically, analogically? Does the term “soul” denote an abstraction, a conceptualization of uniformity within experience, a super-natural animating power, entity, or gift? Is it a permanence, or a flow of sensation, action, being? Is soul made? Is it generated? Is soul (spirit, mind, psyche) an epiphenomenon of bio-chemistry? Is it the “whole” of man—the force animating of the sentient, animal, and rational being, or is it merely something rational? If it is merely the rationality of man, is it personal? Is there an endurance beyond biology? Is there an endurance within the meaningfulness of history, of time, or merely a deliquescence of elements? Is immortality a supernatural gift? Is immortality, an endurance beyond death, something personal, or an absorption into, or a dissolution into the flow of eternality?
When we speak of soul are we merely expressing an experience, a sense of control, of presence (illusive perhaps, delusive according to some), a consciousness of locus, an experience of time/space, a memory of event, a my world within a world, a cosmos? In like manner, when we speak of God are we merely expressing of the cosmos a locus of control, of presence, a cosmo-crator, an all-ruler [Pantocrator, Παντοκράτωρ], a platform of being (everlasting or eternal), ever receding, and like unto “I”, variably valued as illusive or delusive, yet, again like “I”, that is constant, although not de-finable, limitable in that it is the very sense of limit that gives power and meaning to world, to life, to being?
Can we trust (make a leap of faith) that there is a foundational unity to being that allows for analogical reference to correlated parts? Can we somewhat so trust? Can we act as if there exists a unity of being, a correlation of parts? May we so act on such an “as if” for utilitarian, pragmatic purposes—on the presupposition of its functionality toward some perceived good, which good is more accurately named a supposition, a faith-held positive additive to one’s integration?
In the realm of that which cannot be reduced to empirical verification, in the realm of intuition, pre-apprehension, insight, in the realm of ana-locution, in the realm that holds the ideas and ideals of love, beauty, truth, good, the realms of God and soul, there is no “sense”, no one de-limiting mode of experience, no one perspective the mind can possibly assume. That which God and soul denote depends upon where one stands, upon where one chooses to stand—upon a certain soulfulness or soullessness[i], a living focus, a whole-making centre, the “ultimacy” of integration, of freedom, or the absence of all such, a lost-ness in self-alienation into the masses.
Freedom denotes something that is neither licentious, nor ambiguous, nor chaotic. Freedom is a freedom for or a freedom to. It is “oriented”, it is “eastward”, turned toward the rising sun, to the light, to seeing things in an ever new dawn. It carries a positive potency for creativity, novelty, embrace, and ultimately put, love.[ii] Thus, we speak of God as love, as light, as creator, as whole and as integrating. Theism, pantheism, panentheism, deism, pietism, atheism,[iii] and all the other “god-isms”—all but perspectives, some at times more hope-filled than others, more embracing than others. Only the soul, the breath within the action of being, can know the proper icon of the day, but there is no day wherein the icon of the day can healthily be other than “to be loving”, and this the soul, reflecting without fear upon itself, knows without doubt, without any variance of perspective. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” Mrs. Browning wrote to her love. So too every soul asks of itself, its world, its gods, its most deep and rich concerns, its health and wholeness, its “holy” and its wholly One, its locus of ultimate integration.
Knowledge is not for-itself[iv]. It is a tool, something purposeful, a quest for meaning, for a directionality of proper, healthful action, the answer to the questions of what ought I to do and why ought I so do. It is ultimately a quest for a comprehensive vision, a whole picture and a proper way to respond to it. Knowledge may come in varied forms, but all forms are tools for making life—this precious, fragile, life of the cosmos in which we but share—as the ancients named it, καλοκαγαθία [calocagathia], the “good-and-beauteous”, a truth of being, a truth of being that is created in the act of loving it. The Hebrew scriptures claim God looked upon the cosmos and declared it good; the Christian scriptures tell us why he did so—because he so loved it to will its perfection in himself, that having sent it forth out of himself, has recalled it back into himself.
Perhaps with empiricism’s dismissal of substance from the ideas of god and soul we come again to an appreciation of these items as non-substantive, as spiritual–qualitative as opposed to quantitative–and with that as valuations, as understandings of the enduring worth of order and purpose within oneself and the cosmos at the most fundamental level.
In concert with Otto’s considerations of the numinous, Franz Rosenzweig spoke of God being not life but light. Light fascinates us as much as it terrifies us with in its absence and the shadows obstacles before it throw. In a lifetime we each are privy to myriad sunrises and sunsets, and yet we seem never to tire of rhapsodizing them in word, music, dance, paint and photographic plate. We are drawn to light’s coming and going, to its constant return, to its daily being, its beginning and its end, to its pure being, and so too to all it reveals—a cosmos and a self in all their complexities–their creation, their end, their eternity, their immortality.[v]
It is not an insight missing from the epistemologies of Plato, Augustine and a host of others, from the visions of sundry mystics both occidental and oriental. It signals the qualitative, the spiritual, the non-material, as that by which we can see, internally and externally, by which and in which we can measure and evaluate all things. Soul is not a thing; it references the wholeness of a man as God references the wholeness of reality. Soul and God are neither tangible nor concrete, but they make reality what it is. They are light. In the hyaline pools of inspiration, value, purpose, and aim they reveal the world and self as enduring creations, immortal sums of all that is ever passing away from our grasp, and thus are ever being encoded in those transcendental and aesthetic terms of the good, the true, the beauteous. They reveal “creation” and “redemption” not as objects of our sensing but as that which resides at the luminous apogees, that which to us is beyond the dusk of the most ancient past or the coming horizon ever receding over the pinnacle of the now. God and soul are revelatory to each at every moment of stirring to joy, to creativity, to reaching out to another in good will, good cheer, in kindness, consideration, love. Thus, theologians have spoken of grace, the presence, the light, of God, as the prerequisite for correctly knowing and rightly doing. The story-book versions of these items, in varied degrees, may capture some parcel of their reality and vibrancy, but the spiritual immaturity of the world to not recognize the fictive garb in which as intangibles they must be dressed obfuscates their cultural relevance and power. It is to the credit of some spiritual leaders today that dogma, the intellectual enrobing of these realities, is downplayed, and the vocation to embrace, accept, and love their dynamic underscored. God and soul reference acts of foundational and everlasting worth, and we too easily confuse the reality of an act with a materiality of actor because we are psycho-somatic, and try as we might, that biramous nature colours all our imaging with a somatic blush.
Body and soul, creator and creation, creating and being created—these divisions are rational entities, logical constructs, man-made concepts exsected out of reality for the purpose of navigating the world. Man is not a body with a soul, nor a soul with a body. Man is–a body within the continuum of quantitative materiality, a soul within the continuum of qualitative non-materiality, a history within the continuum of interpreted time, an interconnected system within a larger interconnected system, a unit within a universe, whose harmonization (and that is what on varied levels truth, good, and beauty signal) is also its pulse, its raison d’etre, its font, its end, in brief, the everlastingness of its eternality. Man is not a thing despite the datum that the apprehension of human animation by another is made possible by the epiphenomenon of action, by the appearance of the empirical data action creates. Thus also of God.
This something the theology of Hinduism knows more succinctly, for God is action whose epiphenomena is the universe. Rarely, if ever, can we receive this in its wholeness. We do rarely receive it because it abides in simple-most faith, the making of oneself related to another, more precisely, the startling recognition from within of one’s interconnectivity to other. That relation on its ultimate level is always robed, more often bedizened, in some expression of self as so related—in some regula-ting of self, some “binding” of self, in some social expression of such “binding” and regulation, in brief, in a religion, which is, as is every individual, encompassed by a language, a world-vision, a culture. We fail too often to see the distinction between the embrace of faith and the encultured expression of that embrace. Hinduism holds a multiplicity of theological icons no less varied than ours, but we tend to skim over the surface and not appreciate the reality that the “gods” of others fall not far from the multitude of icons we carry about under titles of Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, Good Shepherd, Just Judge, Merciful Father, Loving Brother, etc.—“Masks” all!
God and soul as luminousness cannot be explained without destroying them, without making them into some amassment of the things brought into the light. Thus, Dewey, looking on the contradictions and differing perspectives within talk of spiritual items could dismiss God as a farraginous imbroglio, a confusion of concepts. Yet, no philosopher has claimed his analysis is factual—merely descriptive. We allow physics to speak of particle-wave duality, of the function of quanta at times to act like a particle, at others like a wave, yet we are suspicious of a metaphysics that sometimes speaks of the qualitative, the non-material, the spiritual as a being, and at others as being or Being. When the part attempts to enunciate the whole, either of self, or of cosmos or of the basis of cosmos, who can expect the attainment of a perspective beyond the whole? Religion, the transmittal of the commonality of a faith expression, has too often been taken literally by too many within and without that community, and thus, its rendering, its picturing, of God and soul have been made concrete idols rather than living inspirations, theories rather than mission codes.
Faith is not something that can be reduced into concepts. It is expressed in narratives, myths, visions, and they cannot be dissolved into theories without thereby dissipating their very life, their superfluous meaning-fulness. Their meaningfulness resides precisely between the words, between the lines. Faith is the matrix of words, of logos, of knowledge. It is the un-thought out of which the thought arises, within which the thought resides. Thus, scripture pictures the eternal Word arising out of the eternal silence of the Godhead and into the signi-ficant, the sign-making, and its dynamic moves, as Hopkins elates, “with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”. Faith expresses a primitive connectivity to the cosmic environment. Like existence, it is experienced as given, as gift. It is that by which, from which, one lives. It is always a horizon beyond; it reveals the horizon beyond. Like love, it is non-cognitive. It is an intuitive embrace. It flows from the boundary regions of consciousness. It is forced to become discursive only when questioned, when brought under the micro-scope—the delimiting, “the making smaller of vision”–stirred by consciousness of self or other that asks “Why?”, the question we come to loath in children of a certain age, but which we ourselves ask if we are to grow intellectually, spiritually. Faith is freedom, openness to con-vert [to turn-with], to turn around, to re-pent [to go back or within, to re-source (creativity)].
Faith is about action not dogma, about being not knowing. Christianity is a belief that I am encountered of a power above, below, within, and beyond the cosmos such that I avow myself to love the world, to make tangible in the world the Christ-vision of God as love—not the concept of God, not the doctrine of God, but the very reality of God—the act, the self-giving, creative act of being with, accepting the past and present, the hope of futurity, the whole of reality moving toward that being-with and being-for-other that infolds the cosmos in its every part, negative and positive, until it reaches the ever unrealizable end wherein being and other vanish—apocatastasis.
Every “religious” person needs to consider deeply and well that the error of the serpent’s quizzing in our Paradise lost was that he spoke of God without first realizing God. There can be no talk about God or what God is unless first we act what God is. Only then–and when and if the world asks–may we talk about acceptance, being-with and being-for, about love and about love as the power, the dynamic that gives to life meaning, value (grace), and as that which gives is known as giver, giver of life (creator), giver of meaning (redeemer). Mark well: all those words are explanations of God, of soul. Only love can experience them, know them, their power, their power to reveal, to vitalize. The priority is not thought but thoughtfulness, not self-consciousness but thou-consciousness, not to wonder but to become wonderful. Beauty, truth, good have no objective reality. They are subjective goals, ideals as Plato named them. Christianity goes astray by stressing the occidental focus on logos, on mind understood as reason, forgetting scripture’s vision of logos is always under and in and by the power of the Spirit. Again, the vision of the tri-unity (the concomitant transcendence, immanence, and dynamic) of the Godhead stands the all-embracing form, for any theology that gives primacy to a pure transcendent will always manifest under the aspects of power, glory, the separate, the Other, and with that, the frozen perfection of the all holy law; while any theorizing that stresses the transcendent simply in movement to become the immanent will present as a neutral, a not-either, formulating an idealism reminiscent of those not always felicitous nineteenth century endeavours to enunciate the Absolute as Spirit, Will or Ego; while any theorizing the presents the immanent simply in its being drawn into the transcendent will conjure up a negation of this life, an ascetic generated absorption, or a world-passivity that fallaciously turns away from life in search of some pseudo-life, an “eternal life”, as if such could have any meaning apart from root in this very life we have and are given to enjoy and not escape; while, lastly, any focus on pure immanence will beget a radical terrestrially, manifesting either as a hedonism, or as a dissipation of life into good works or humanistic ideas too easily caught up in the au courant will of the masses, or, most dangerously, as an ethic of an enlightened and entitled superman or herrenvolk.
The prophet Isaiah, true to a literary heritage of playing with sounds, pairs Hebrew homophones allowing him to equate faith and life. By the Apostle Paul’s time Plato’s ideas have deluged the world, and thus Paul speaks of faith equalling knowledge [gnosis], and that focus continues through the mediaeval ideas of faith seeking understanding or of understanding seeking completion in faith, the distinction Aquinas, armed with an Aristotelian vocabulary, divides into formal faith and material faith.
From generations lost to history we have spun out words of wisdom, philosophies, pulsing ourselves forward in acts of faith in the quest for meaningfulness of self and world. These intuitions, speculations, and hopes we have encoded in visions, narratives, logics, theories, words and rites. From time to time philosophy and the conceptualized forms of its sister, faith, speak of the same topics, but their languages, despite similarities of sound, are two distinct and unrelated tongues, their vantage points unique, philosophy at its desk scrutinizing, and faith at its altar worshipping. As science looks to establish an all-encompassing knowledge of how the cosmos functions, philosophy looks to establish the knowledge of a god-principle, to make a statement that it is logical or reasonable, in some way (be it as an exigency of understanding or will, a matter of the subconscious gestalt, an analogy founded on being or the presumption of the unity of being, etc.) to say there is a first principle and guarantor of truth and goodness, a foundational principle for and of knowing and valuing. Faith does not investigate the possibility or the rationality of there being a God either as a first principle or a guarantor of perception’s verifiability. Faith is a personal avowal of God, a confession of God. This confession is not a rational act; it is a creedal act, a personal and evaluative act based on an encountering, a personalizing act of love and its concomitant commitment. As this or that scholar attempts to take that faith and explain it, rationalize it, the language and mind-set of philosophy supplants the heart-set of faith. The Subject of profoundest love becomes the object of analysis. One in love knows, however, the beloved cannot be touched or encased as an object of study—be that as regards ancestry, medical history, academic achievement, psychological profile, social connections, life’s work, or even as the totality of such things. Yet we—all–too often forget this when the Subject beyond all subjects is looked upon. With a terse wisdom “Thou shalt love the Lord” begins the great command. Nowhere does it provide that thou shalt study the Lord or feign to comprehend the proto-cosmic Thou wherein reside our beginning and end. Nowhere does love’s command mean other than embrace. Nowhere in love’s reality does any under-standing that may arise supplant or exceed the reality of mutuality, of embrace, in which it has its essence and root. Every great theologian, before becoming lost in his words, has rehearsed the vision of the saints: The Lord is the heart’s treasure, and treasure is to enjoy—caringly, well.
The vision of, the encountering of, a loving God may rouse the heart to love and care, but it cannot make the mind comprehend the parameters of that joy, explain the wonder of that ecstasy without deflating the vision into a fraise of friable fragments. Reason is a cold thing, the heart is not. Reason can explain without end. It takes a heart to truly understand. This is the thesis of Augustine and his philosophical disciples, of great saints and mystics of both East and West, of all them not bonded to the supremacy of rationalization. This is the thesis trampled upon by so many little minds confusedly thinking reason can before God suffice, and so think their words, even their meagre sacred-most words, can convey the holy, when in our iconography God himself placed his living Word in the flesh, in the living out of a life, a self-sacrificing life of blessing, healing and forgiveness. By religion we are called to wonderfulness and joy, not to the comprehension of the incomprehensibles—God, the world, self and other. By philosophy we may be summoned to investigate, consider, analyse, and excogitate these topics, and we may indeed do so today and until the end of time, but all that will yield to us is idea and theory, at very best, a vision to which to arise. It will not yield life or love. Ideas are tools. They may be used for good, they may be made the media of healing and health, the creative instruments of love and life, and they may be used for ill, made the contumelious instruments of denigration and derogation, the weapons of hate and war. Ideas, and the spoken idea, the word, must be handled (literally, placed in the hand, that is, concretized, incarnated) with care. It is by no accident that English uses the word intercourse to denote both a coming together verbally, dialogically, but also sexually, bodily. There is an innate and intimate connectedness in the composition of humanity, of body and soul, heart and mind, spirit and flesh, and language, spoken as well as subliminal. Creeds, dogmas, reason—all these are tools, instruments to foster life, or instruments to torture and destroy. Too often are they made the latter. Too often is the God of love set aside in favour of the God of righteousness, and righteousness seditiously and secretly heart-kept as self-righteousness. Therein creeds, dogmas, religion, piety, and even works of most sincere charity are made to be seen as carbuncular deformities upon the being of humanity rather than the evocations of the spirit that make us truly human, that awaken us to the possibilities trust and hope herald.
How do we paint the perceived, the conceived, the felt, the hoped for, the essential functionality of life, of cosmos? Science can set out its formulae, philosophy its descriptive systems, religion its aspirational narratives, but all these are but pictures ranging from the abstracts of mathematics, to the metaphors of philosophy, to the symbolisms of religion. Reality, however, occurs at the moment, the now, the eternal and enduring now, the only fleeting place we ever have and yet always have—the incarnate nexus of the transcendent and dynamic, the past and the future, the was and the might be, the nexus wherein moment is actor and actor moment, the place open to novelty, to the freedom to apply those eternal forms of truth, beauty, and good to the reality we elect to make, to love, to redeem, to save. We are one. We are cosmos and the Cosmocrator will appear not merely in heart but in reality when each freely empties selfhood into the factuality that we are only as we are wholly one.
May every endeavour in the consideration of our life and world be prefaced by the prayer, or if you would, by the self-admonition, that as we soar in reason’s wings, we fly not off to some imagined heaven’s embrace, or some feigned transcendence of mind, that a heart humbled by the magnitude of being’s breadth, see where thought cannot, and find truest and most whole-some value, beside, within, before, in friend and foe, in neighbour far and near, ever incarnate and ever glorious.
As once they were wont to say in my church: “Here endeth the lesson”.[vi]
[i] I was tempted to delete this reference to an abundance or lack of soul, but it is vital to again stress the dichotomous disruptions that are engendered by placing logic above heart. I, thus, supply the following reflections.
on Mercy and Justice
Recently I heard a prelate of the Roman Church tell an audience that justice and mercy were the same. In an ideal world perhaps such is true, but then, in an ideal world would the ideas of justice and mercy have any occasion to arise? Justice is always justice under the law, a system of imposing an equitable recompense for an act. It is legal, logical, rational, and cold, something inanimate. Thus, having found Christ or, more accurately, having mercifully been found by Christ and having embraced him, St. Paul could tell his charges that the Law of Moses was dead, that it died in God’s victory on the cross, in the indestructability of the creative Spirit both making and manifesting God’s child. Mercy arises out of freedom, openness to another, to standing in the place of another, the acceptance, embrace and cherishing of another, thus, out of the creativity of love. Mercy does not know law, does not comprehend “things” written in stone; it knows people and their world, their fragility and friability. Mercy is one of the many colours of love in action. Common laws tells us it is wrong to kill, to lie, and to steal. Therein such laws embody ideals of true worth. On the pragmatic level they set out censures for the varied situations and degrees of violation. Mercy knows there are times wherein to kill, or lie, or steal become the acceptable course because the world is itself neither an ideal nor equitable place. Moral laws tell us sexual activity outside the bond of marriage is destructive self-indulgence. Mercy knows there stand vast differences amongst self-obsession, the exercise of healthy natural impulses, and spiritual scrupulosity in search of “self”-transcendence. Civil laws define marriage as an inviolable union of persons in body, heart, and mind until death does part. Mercy is well aware marriage is a coming together of two imperfect and mortal beings, and that, like them, their avowed contract is susceptible to the ravages of times and temperaments, that it can become ill and even die, most commonly through neglect and ignorance. Mercy knows there are times when the bonds of a marriage will need be broken in the hope, sometime the blind hope, that it will save or at least sustain it while some other avenue of treatment is sought. Mercy knows the Jesus who asks: “Who condemns you?” Mercy knows writing things in stone is best left to tombstones.
I am not teaching mercy either ought or can replace justice merely that they are not one and the same thing viewed from varied perspectives. Furthermore, as every system of justice is bounded by a cultural perspective, there is much regarding the processes of adjudication a society can learn from others, as in this realm from the indigenous nations. I am not teaching mercy as some form of adiaphora, heedlessness, or impudence, for mercy comprehends the sad state of our care for one another. Mercy knows intimately what it means to suffer. It wears, however, that anguish in a silent and “sacred heart” as broken open as enflamed of love, not as some badge of self-glorification, a blazoned “Woe is poor suffering me!” Mercy knows the reality of the vicarious immolation and the concomitant resurrection into a higher plane of being, the power contained within the opening-up of self and the giving-over of self to another. It knows the redemptive power released in all directions by such action, its potency to create a new place, a richer place.
Customarily justice is depicted as a human figure blind-folded and carrying a scale; justice cannot see persons, its function is to blindly weigh acts. Justice knows the rules of social order. Mercy looks a person in the eye, more precisely, in the heart, the soul. Mercy knows persons. In that it knows also their rules of social order, their necessity, their value, but it rises higher and plunges deeper. It does not seek a condemnation, a punishment, a balance, a restoration of balance. It seeks a creative and healthful solution, not a resolution, not a going back to as it was, but a new solvency, a new flow. Mercy understands reformers and saints when they decry all humanity is a sea of sin, a mass of self-interest, self-absorption, self-justification unless it be “infused by the grace of God”, unless it stands in the acknowledgement that we are one, called into the One. In more secular terms, it knows that despite any failing or flaw there is something greater, a creative base, a creative presence (grace) at the foundation and in the life-blood of the world. Justice can only work within the parameters of the established; mercy is open to novelty in search of well-being. It requires one to be aware of self, of one’s prejudices, one’s predispositions, and of the other and the situation in which the other stands and has stood. It demands there be no cookie-cutter response, no appeal to “this is right, this is wrong”. It knows it must enfold the whole of the situation, must enter it with open mind and heart and hand, that it must listen and hear, must stand there with and for, knowing it has no answers, that all it can offer is itself, a depth of self, of life and love. This is not something fondly beheld by people who want fixed answers to life’s every “problem” for it demands thinking for oneself, it requires spiritual, moral, human maturity. Many people grow to adulthood and still feel they can confront the issues of the world like pre-schoolers fitting a square block into a square hole, a circular block into a circular hole, etc., despite the fact we cannot deny we consistently find ourselves in the midst of a complex equation of countless variables whose parameters are not known, nor can be known. Morality is not about justice and rule of law; it is about growing in wisdom and grace, about the risk, often the sacrifice, the costly sacrifice, of making oneself open to and for the well-being of the world. Morality knows the limits of good and evil, and the limitlessness of bringing the presence of propitiation to the situation (Cf: Part 8, endnote vi).
There is a place for confrontation and confession, for restitution, retribution, repentance and rehabilitation, but they realistically cannot be adjudicated, cannot be en-forced. Mercy opens a place for them, for they have power only if they arise out of person with person, out of the embrace—the mutuality—of understanding, acceptance, care. That is neither easy, nor simple, nor superficial; it is effective and transformative. Do we elect to live life in the shadow of that fateful tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or dare we embrace that other once forbidden fruit, the fruit of the tree of life, the fruit freely given in the divine self-immolation Christians are summoned to emulate?
[ii] Freedom carries a positive charge, but as openness it is open to corruption, to the free embrace of its denial or neglect, and therein to functioning as a negating force spinning out all manner of negativities: self-insularity, delusions of self-transcendence, self-perfection, self-justification and the concomitant visions of the divine that support that pseudo-self against all others: the vengeful, tyrannical, legalistic, angry god of hell fire and damnation that must emerge when one effectively makes of oneself god, the carved out of stone idol, the self-assured and unbending legislator and adjudicator, the dominator of all.
[iii] Atheism is a type of theism. It usually denies “a god”. However, the denial is not necessary to its being. Buddha’s teachings are usually (authentically?) taken as atheistic, but his deletion of God is not direct. If my understanding of the Buddha’s teachings is correct, we may say the karmic world of the East is akin to the cosmic world of the West—both denote a non-chaotic world, a universe that operates with a given order. Both reference not what things are but how things work. To be brief and not expound upon how the order morally functions (as a line from here to eternity with the occasional corrective curve or loop, or as a sphere with an internal dynamic in search of gimbals) it may summarily be noted that unlike the West, the East has consistently understood this ordered world as an inter-connectivity– a flow of time, a succession of events, of life that is non-individualistic, non-absolute. Thus for the oriental mind, Buddha in particular, the divine, the absolute, is beyond such; it has no words, no concepts, no analogies, no metaphors, no applicable mental or material pictures. Buddha deletes not so much God as the question of God. The meaning of life must be found in the living of this life, in the eight-fold path of liberation (freedom). Any talk of God is something beyond human capacity or concern. In his thought action and being are co-relates. In occidental thought, the traditional accentuation differs: being and God are co-related, with being understood either as relation (verb), quality (adjective) or thing (noun). Thus, in the West salvation, man’s ultimate fulfilment, is in some manner an in-corporation, an influx, an affiliation into God, the divine or the whole, and in the East some manner of leaving behind action–and thus being–and thus, a dissolution into no-relation, no-quality, no-thing. (Before anyone become aflutter over anything here noted, pause, and mark a terse paragraph on oriental thought cannot even skim that which libraries belabour to contain.)
[iv] Nothing in the cosmos is for-it-self. Everything is intertwined, inter-connected, interwoven into one grand ecosystem heaving to exist. Thus, we speak of the Wholly One as self-giving, as creator, creativity, parent, openness, freedom, selflessness, the-for-other, love. Thus, we speak of past and future out of the present, of a grasping backwards as well as forward, of connectivity, of con-nexus, of bridge-making (in Latin, pontificare, from which we take the religious designation for one whose work is to build bridges, to connect us to others and Other: pontifex, pontiff).
[v] It is of note that we pray for the dead that “light eternal shine upon them”—that they be always in the light, visible, accessible, maintained real.
[vi] …not, however, dear reader, my inquiries!