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[thinkingthru]

Further Reflections: Summary

God is masculine in relation to the world and the world is feminine in relation to God (though of course, in themselves, God has no gender and the world contains both genders). If we accept this archetypal truth then in restoring the value of the feminine it is insufficient to simply a) attribute the feminine to God or b) attribute the world to God (i.e. ‘God is everything’).

There is something like a feminine principle within God, which is drawn out in Hinduism—namely, Shakti, God’s power, energies in the world. But this is just to recapitulate the primary God–World distinction within God—whether or not you then take the world itself as separate. In other words, God’s ‘power’ is precisely his ability to create and act within the world, which necessarily refers back to the world as a more fundamental notion. The masculine principle—Shiva, God’s transcendent essence—is what we most mean by the Western religious notion of God: a being fundamentally beyond the world.

But as I explained in my post on Kali, to simply attribute the world itself to God is also insufficient, nullifying our notion of God by either removing his love (the principles are united and so God intends all suffering) or his unity and power (the principles are divided, and so God is divided against himself). The feminine and masculine principles must both be present, separate but in relation.

Therefore, there is a Soul of the World, worthy of all reverence (save God alone), yearning for wholeness and healing for all of us, in intimate communion with God, whose grace she channels into the world. And then there is God himself, eternally beyond the world that he created, existing as the perfect love of three Persons, who created Kali–Sophia in all her glorious multiplicity to welcome as an integral whole into their relation of pure love. If God is our ultimate Father, then Kali–Sophia is our ultimate Mother. Therefore: “Honor your Father and your Mother.”

To summarize some key points in bullet form:

• Creation is a living, personal, feminine whole (‘Kali–Sophia’) in relation with the Creator.

• The body of this whole is diseased by sin—the material world is fallen. But the spiritual center of Kali–Sophia is unfallen (or else how would Creation continue to manifest any goodness at all?).

• Primordial humanity took this manifest world as absolute. With only a hazy understanding of her transcendent origins, they took her evil with her goodness and embodied both.

• The rise of civilization and patriarchal religion threw off her dominance, positing a spiritual, inseminating, masculine principle (reaching its fullest development in monotheism) outside the whole world-body. But in the ferocity of this overthrow they sought to eliminate her entirely.

• Christianity implicitly recognizes the intrinsic value of Creation (in God’s saving sacrifice, in the Virgin Mary, the bodily resurrection, etc.), although it has also shown strong tendencies in the other direction. ‘Saving Creation’ can easily turn back into ‘subduing Creation’ if the masculine principle is overemphasized and the feminine principle ignored.

• Explicit acknowledgment of the Anima Mundi within a Christian framework allows for a renewed animism, for the world to come alive to us again at every level. The spirits of things would not then be idols but co-beings with us, created by the Father and nurtured by the Mother. Relationship would be everywhere (which seems appropriate, if God is intrinsically relationship and made the world for relationship with him).

• Contrary to Jung, there is no real ‘Problem of the Fourth’: with the Trinity, Creation itself is its ‘Fourth.’ We are part of the picture, though not implicitly at the center. Recognition of Kali–Sophia as the Fourth ‘Person’ by grace completes the picture, but also compels us to strive for the restoration of fallen Creation—to strive for perfection, not only Jungian completeness.

• The image of Kali is an excellent aid for contemplation: the fallen world is dark, full of arbitrary, uncontrollable suffering and slaughter—and yet we must look at all this and love her nonetheless (and in loving her, we see through this). God himself loves her so much he submits to be trampled under her feet.

None of this is to say that God is actually male and the world actually female. Maleness and femaleness, and even archetypal femininity and masculinity (Yin and Yang, etc.) really exist only within the world (even the archetypal, because true duality cannot exist within God). In an absolute sense, we cannot say God and the world have gender, in relation to each other or in themselves. The nature of each and the relation between them is ultimately unsayable. Yet we creatures need images and words, and natural and divine revelation have cooperated to provide us with them.

It is precisely now that we need the awareness of ecology, of holism at all levels, and real reverence for the world that Kali–Sophia brings. Having come through the masculine–monotheist revolution (so far that we even eliminated the living God, so that only abstract reason reigns and reduces the world to nothing), we need to recover and integrate the sense for the ‘goddess’—the Soul of the World in her noble glory. And we need to do this in an authentic way, integrated with all the genuine gains we have made in theory and practice through development of the masculine principle. These posts have sketched out my (still somewhat unclear and fragmentary) vision of what that would look like.

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The Problem of the Fourth

There is one more issue I want to write about in connection with these reflections. For Jung, the Trinity was lacking. He noticed the Quaternity (four balanced principles) was the universal image for completeness. As he saw it, the masculine–spiritual Trinity neglected the feminine and the earthly—the fourth principle he believed should be included in it. He believed that this unbalanced image of divinity causes imbalance in the psyche of those who revere it.

Jung contrasts completeness with perfection. His own ideal is completeness, wholeness, being a well-balanced, ‘integrated’ individual. But in order to be complete, you have to include every aspect of yourself, including all of your imperfection (including all of your evil). On the other hand, the Western religious ideal seems to be perfection: going straight, with all your strength, in one direction, neglecting all other aspects of your being (and in fact, hoping for the total elimination of evil). You can see this magnificently in the lives of saints.

The Jungian view assumes that humanity is naturally already at the ‘center’ (Jung’s notion for God is the Self—though this is deeper than the conscious ego, it is still radically imminent). Our task is therefore only a deeper and fuller integration of all that exists around this center (in all four ‘directions’). The Christian view is that humanity is already radically off-center—specifically, fallen. The task therefore is not only integration, but to get back to the right position (near to the truly transcendent God, where grace flows freely).

Is the Christian Cross a symbol of Quaternity (the four arms) or a symbol of Trinity (the three of equal length)? Is it a symbol of completeness (the four arms), or of perfection (the heavenward height of the crossbar)? Of course, it brings these all of together. And it contains a clue to understanding the true Quaternity.

God is love: therefore God is three Persons in unity. One is alone, and therefore is not love (such a God would either be utterly unloving or else would need something outside himself). With two, love enters but does not yet flourish (this dyadic love is not a loving-with, has no community, and thus either cannot or will not expand beyond itself). With three comes loving-with, two Persons in love loving a third—and thus love is perfected; a fourth adds nothing essential to this.

Thus God is Three, but this Three still implies a Fourth—a Fourth that adds nothing essential. The perfect community of love internal to God necessarily wills to expand, to share itself—but there is nothing to share itself with. So God in his omnibenevolent omnipotence turns this nothing into something, and thereby creates the world—creates Kali–Sophia, creates a Fourth. But this ‘Fourth’ is essentially absolutely different from God. God includes her in within the Trinitarian love by his absolute grace, but she does not ‘belong’ there by nature.

Within quaternities, the fourth factor is often crucially different from the rest (earth is not quite the same kind of thing as air, fire, water; the dimension of time is not quite the same as the three dimensions of space; the Gospel of John is different from the three Synoptics). Kali–Sophia belongs in the quaternity of all that most basically is (all further Creation coming from her free cooperation with the Creator), but she is essentially different from the other Three. They exist by their very nature; she exists by their grace.

And because the possibility for division and rejection pertain to created being in a way they do not to Divine being, there is the possibility for fallenness within this Fourth. This fallenness can only be healed by a radical act of God’s grace, with the cooperation of this Fourth being—and so we have the story of the Incarnation of Christ. The Christian cross symbolizes God trying to pull us back up into our original position of closeness and communion with him.

Perfection and completeness are both of importance—but for us, perfection is of vital primacy. Completeness is only possible from perfection—completeness outside of perfection is only more complete corruption. But the aspiration to perfection must not lose sight of completeness either. We are not going to leave the world behind, nor subjugate her, but only take our proper place as creatures within her, to do the work we were made to do, gardeners in the Garden.

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Further Reflections: Sophia

Could the Great Mother ever be integrated into a Christian worldview, and what would this look like? In a way, she already is, in the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. But strictly speaking, Mary is one creature among creatures, one human being (however pure) among human beings, who came into existence at a certain point in time, long after the world was made. In orthodox theology, she cannot be the World Soul that existed from the beginning (not least because there is no such World Soul).

But what if there was such a World Soul—if the created universe were a living, integral being, as Solovyov suggests? There’s at least a hint at this in the Bible, where the feminine Sophia (Wisdom) says:

The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

[...] when he marked out the foundations of the earth then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.

If we read Sophia as the Soul of the World, then there’s a real cooperation between God and the world that he creates. Before anything else is made, Sophia comes into existence as God’s first and all-encompassing ‘other,’ and with her all things are made. But why do we ‘need’ the Great Mother, and can she really live within a Christian worldview, notwithstanding these hints in scripture?

Just as the tendency of Mother-worship is to the quashing of human consciousness, so the tendency of Father-worship is to reduce (practically and theoretically) the living world to inertness. With the triumph of the value of consciousness comes the devaluing of the natural world. This reaches excess in world-fleeing asceticism, the denial by pure-monotheism of any indwelling personality in nature, and eventually the modern scientistic denial of any intrinsic value in nature.

Christianity has a different relation to the world: God loves the world, and grants it such value and autonomy that he even submits to dying within it. The fundamental Christian hope, bodily resurrection, is also an extreme affirmation of the world’s value. Rather than escaping from physicality, we hope to live in a perfected physical world forever. And further: this perfected world is only a restored world, material creation is essentially good.

The world in its essential goodness and deep bond with the Creator—this is Florensky’s ‘Great Root of Creation,’ Sophia. And yet our world is fallen: evil and suffering coexist with goodness and beauty as Kali rages. Kali and Sophia show us different aspects of the World Soul: Sophia emphasises her deep essential goodness, and Kali emphasises her pervasive outer fallenness.

But how can the World Soul (henceforward: Kali–Sophia) be the whole world and yet a person? In the same way that a human person is their whole functioning body, which is composed of countless organs, cells, and even organisms. Being may not be ‘flat,’ but multi-layered: as the human body is a complex system indwelt by an individual being, so there may be other levels of individual being both above and below this (in the systems that are part of us and the systems we are part of).

In any case, we should expect that the personal God’s beloved universe (especially in its unfallen state) should be an integral, personal whole—Florensky’s Fourth Person, included by grace into the Trinity. And there’s good reason to think that, within this all-embracing personality, God’s Creation is populated with distinct personal centers of being all the way down.

This doesn’t negate humans’ unique role, or mean that all other personal centers have the same nature as humans (the same kind of consciousness or ability). But a Creation that is an integral plurality of personal beings is surely a more magnificent and glorious Creation than the (masculized) universe of only God, man, and dead matter.

In other words, the notion of Kali–Sophia leaves room for animism. If only the world herself is allowed to be alive, all parts of her may be alive in our awareness again. This would not be a pre-patriarchal animism of terror and subjection to the world, but a post-patriarchal animism of multifarious Creation united within the relationship to its loving Creator.

And yet—if the world is fallen, does that mean that Kali–Sophia herself is fallen? The analogy to the human body is helpful here also. If an organ of the human body malfunctions or fails, the whole body is affected and thrown into disorder. But it does not necessarily affect the spirit, does not necessarily change the basic moral attitude of the person. The sin of humanity—a part (the heart?) of the body of Kali–Sophia—affects the whole of the physical universe like an illness; but it needn’t drag down its spiritual center, who was there before humanity and embraces humanity.

Nonetheless, as a created being, Kali–Sophia is subject to finitude: space, time and division. As absolute spiritual center she is ever in faithful communion with God, but she is not currently a fully integral whole. Instead, aspects of her whole being are divided, diseased, in rebellion (humanity chief among them). She suffers from this, but she does not cause the evil.

Love wills to heal and restore her, and yet, “he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” As Kierkegaard emphasises: to love someone you must love the one you see. If we are to love the world, we must not just love the abstract image of spiritual Sophia, but the terrible image of Kali—of the world as it actually is, in all its fallenness (but whose glorious core is this very Sophia).

Just as we cannot truly love the abstract ideal of a person, but only the fallen, imperfect person we see, we cannot truly love Kali–Sophia except through all the world’s fallenness. Yet in loving the person we see, their essential perfection (locked away as potential) becomes truly manifest to us for the first time. So too may our sincere love for the suffering world reveal to us that glorious feminine being, our Mother and God’s bride, dwelling in the whole of Creation.

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Further Reflections: Kali

There is a later form of the Goddess who seems more in balance. Certain forms of Hinduism seem to retain both the masculine and feminine principles together, i.e. the notion that God (in his Power, Shakti) has become the world, and the world is therefore real (as opposed to the pure Advaitin notion that the world is negative illusion, which is simply dominance of the masculine).

But this is really a conflation of the two principles—God and the world are the same. And this conflation implies the doctrine of lila: all phenomena, including all evil and suffering, are just God’s divine play. If the transcendent God and imminent world are truly one, then God simply intends all the tragedy of the world. Not for some great purpose, but merely for the immediate enjoyment of his self-expression (and the fact that he has also become us, and so only really inflicts it on himself—only makes this vision of reality more of a nightmare).

To really account for evil and suffering in this picture, there would have to be a split within God—Shiva divorced from his Shakti. As in their myth: the world rages uncontrollably without him, and he, for his part, withdraws from her in self-absorbed superiority (echoed in the way the pure-patriarchal God and his men relate to the feminine and the earth).

To me, the image of Kali clearly depicts the fallen world—but not only in its fallenness, and not without the masculine God. Not only in its fallenness: after all, her devotees can see through this image to real goodness and divinity—just as, from a Christian perspective, the fallen world has fundamental, God-made goodness at its core. And the masculine God is present as well—beneath her feet, willing to be trampled by her, in order to restore her (and for her part, she recognizes and responds to his act of self-sacrificing love).

Another virtue of the notion that the Divine is both God and Goddess, both Shiva and Shakti, is that this expresses the truth that God is essentially love. In this view: not only is God is both masculine transcendence and feminine power, but he is the free and loving, personal union of these. This is not quite the Trinity—but not far from it either. Instead of the Three Persons it personifies the essence–energies distinction (while conflating the uncreated energies with the created world).

This seemingly least Christian of images is, to me, one of the most Christian. Though suffering and death rage in the world, the world itself is originally (essentially) noble, good. God himself loves the world—so much so, that he submits to incarnation and suffers death within it, for the sake of saving and restoring it. He lets the world tread on him, and this very act of humble love begins to transform it.

In the Hindu view, however, this drama of fall and salvation could only occur within God. Thus God would be radically split. This is different from the Christian view of Trinity, where all three Persons eternally cooperate in loving union, and it is the created world that falls away from them. In the end, the Hindu view must either imply dualism (if Shiva and Shakti really do separate), thus dispensing with the unity and absolute value of God; or else collapse again into cruel monism (i.e. the separation isn’t real but only God’s divine lila).

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Further Reflections: Earth Mother

The Goddess first appears to humanity as the Great Mother, who is at once the world and the absolute. We clearly arise and live from the world (she births and nourishes us). She surrounds us still. We are reabsorbed into the world when we die. Therefore, the world is supreme. Humans are transient and powerless within the great whole of nature.

The positive side of this perspective is the deep belonging; the negative side is that we are unable to separate ourselves from the ruthlessness of nature. In practice, this entailed not only passively accepting nature’s ravages upon us, but actively take part in them—for instance, recapitulating them in ever-repeating cycles of human sacrifice. (Any authentic adoption of Mother-worship in hypermasculine modernity is impossible—to worship nature while living in domination of nature is just playing, and so needn’t have any of the primitive ruthlessness).

The masculine principle is in the flight from nature (heaven as opposed to earth). As Erich Neumann outlines: first the Great Mother continually devours the budding masculine principle (in the form of male sacrificial victims, and also in the misery and death humanity endures from nature), but eventually it breaks free and instead subdues her (both as the earth and human females). The cruelty of triumphant nature gives way to the fanaticism of triumphant culture.

The total dominance of either the masculine or feminine principle always brings with it tremendous violence, though the kinds of violence are different. The violence of the Great Mother is cyclical, built-in, ‘natural’ (in society: tightly integrated, through ritual, with the innate human drive to cruelty). But the violence of the Father-God is extrinsic, ‘purifying,’ forcefully seeking to eliminate chaos and evil once-and-for-all.

The cult of the Mother internalises violence within society (mirror of nature); the cult of the Father externalises it, seeking to establish a perfect, peaceful order within society by purifying the world of all that stands outside or against it (e.g. the genocides of Canaanites in the Bible, the centrality of jihad to Islam, and the law codes of both).

Neither of these approaches take the two principles together. The ‘matriarchal’ view takes living nature as supreme, the whole out of which all else arises—nature, with all her benevolence and beauty and with all her violence. Humanity, with all its incipient awareness and reason and ethical intuition, never escapes her, but simply reconciles itself to her, for better or worse. The masculine principle is dissolved into the feminine.

The ‘patriarchal’ view takes its own principle and elevates it above nature absolutely: instead of the tangible Mother giving birth to all things, the spiritual God who spoke the very world into being. Humanity finds itself an image of something beyond nature and so strives to escape its ravages (and actually succeeds in minimizing them as civilization grows). But in its furious rebellion against the conditions of earthly existence, it reduces the feminine principle to total inertness. The living body of the Mother becomes ‘mere matter’—to be shaped and used by the Father-God or his human representatives.

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Further Reflections on the Goddess

In my poems and reflections on the Goddess a few years ago, I was trying to understand how the feminine fits in with the nature of God. Here I took a basically Hindu view: the Goddess is God; specifically, is the Power of God; and more specifically, this Power is manifest in concrete, material being.

However, I wasn’t content with the classic Hindu view on the problem of suffering: it is all God’s (more specifically the Goddess’s) lila, divine play. That turns reality into a nightmare. Instead, I saw the evil in the world as a result of the separation of the two divine principles: the masculine (God as transcendent consciousness) and feminine (God as concrete being—world).

I saw this particularly in the famous image and myth of Kali, who falls into a killing frenzy and is unable to be contained until her husband Shiva lets her tread upon his body, which causes her to return to her senses and cease the slaughter. This contact restores the integrity of being.

But another way to express this lack or loss of integrity is: that the world is fallen. This would be the Christian way. And I went in some other Christian directions with those posts and poems: that God is essentially love (though in this case between two persons), and that the material world is real and intrinsically good, beneath its fallen exterior.

I’ve been thinking more deeply about the relation between God and the feminine recently, and my views have evolved somewhat. In the following posts, I’ll try and outline what I’ve come to think about this.

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Sophia: Florensky

[...] God, in the ineffable self-abasement of his infinitude and absoluteness, with all the Divine content of His Divine thought condescends to think about the finite and limited—introduces the meager semi-being of the creature into the fullness of being of the interior of the Trinity, and gives to this creature self-being and self-determinability. That is, He places the creature on the same level as Himself, as it were. From God’s point of view, the reason of a creature is God’s kenotic love for creation. Entering by an indescribable act (in which the ineffable humility of Divine love and the incomprehensible boldness of creaturely love touch each other and cooperate) into the life of the Divine Trinity, which stands above order (for the number “3” does not have an order), this love-idea-monad, this fourth hypostatic element brings about, with respect to itself, a difference in the order (kata taxin) of the Hypostases of the Holy Trinity. And the Holy Trinity condescends to this correlation of Itself with Its own creature and therefore to the determination of Itself by Its creature, thereby “emptying” Itself of absolute attributes. Remaining all-powerful, God treats His creatures as if He were not all-powerful. He does not compel His creatures, but persuades them. He does not force; He asks.

[...]

Sophia is the Great Root of the whole creation [...]. That is, Sophia is all-integral creation and not merely all creation. Sophia is the Great Root by which creation goes into the intra-Trinitarian life and through which it receives Life Eternal from the One Source of Life. Sophia is the original nature of creation, God’s creative love, which is “shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us” (Rom. 5:5). For this reason, the true I of a deified person, his “heart,” is precisely God’s Love, just as the Essence of Divinity is intra-Trinitarian Love. For everything exists truly only insofar as it communes with the God of Love, the Source of being and truth. If creation is torn away from its root, an inevitable death awaits it.

[...]

With regard to creation, Sophia is the Guardian Angel of creation, the Ideal person of the world. The shaping reason with regard to creation, Sophia is the shaped content of God-Reason, His “psychic content,” eternally created by the Father through the Son and completed in the Holy Spirit: God thinks by things.

[...]

Sophia takes part in the life of the Trihypostatic Divinity, enters into the interior of the Trinity, and enters into communion with Divine Love. Since Sophia is a fourth, creaturely, and therefore nonconsubstantial Person, she does not “form” a Divine Unity. She “is” not Love, but only enters into communion with Love. And she is allowed to enter into this communion by the ineffable, unfathomable, inconceivable humility of God.

Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (from Letter Ten)

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Sophia: Solovyov

God, as one, distinguishing from Himself His other, i.e. all that is not He, unites this all with Himself, all together and all at once, in an absolutely perfect form, and, consequently, as a unity. This other unity, distinct though not separable from the primordial Divine unity, is, relative to God, a passive, feminine unity, seeing that here the eternal emptiness (pure potentiality) receives the fulness of the Divine existence. But if at the basis of this eternal femininity lies pure nothing, then for God this nothing is eternally hidden by the image of the absolute perfection which is being received from the Divinity. This perfection, which for us is still only being realized, is for God, i.e., in the truth, already real. That ideal unity towards which our world is aspiring, and which constitutes the end of the cosmic and historical process, cannot be only someone’s subjective understanding (for whose, pray, is it?); truly it is like the external object of Divine love, like His eternal other.

[...]

For God, his other (i.e., the universe) possesses from all eternity the image of perfect femininity, but He desires that this image should exist not merely for Him, but that it should be realized and incarnated in each individual being capable of union with it. Such a realization and incarnation is also the aspiration of the eternal Femininity itself, which is not merely an inert image in the Divine mind, but a living spiritual being possessed of all the fulness of powers and activities. The whole process of the cosmos and of history is the process of its realization and incarnation in a great manifold of forms and degrees.

Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love (from Ch. 4, VII)

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Eating Creation

In my last post I made the case (actually you made the case) for veganism; but in the post immediately before that I pointed out how humans are such a critically important part of creation that we may kill and eat animals to further our flourishing. So being vegan isn’t a duty in all circumstances—and the key to recognising the exceptions lies largely in understanding ‘our flourishing’. I will explore this in the present post, again drawing from early Genesis, which I believe mythically encapsulates a most-basic positive theistic worldview (i.e. where a fundamentally good world is created by an absolutely good God).

The Ideal of Eden

To summarise that previous post: humanity is not just one more addition to creation, a creature like any other. Instead, the introduction of humanity into creation qualitatively transforms the whole of it: it is no longer mere, brute being, but becomes involved in full consciousness (our human self-awareness, which Genesis refers to as the ‘image of God’). With us, the beauty and splendour of the natural world is beheld—is truly present—for the first time. And despite its immense intrinsic value, this awareness which transcends mere being is also immensely useful: it allows us to actively protect and further creation as other creatures could never do (thus God commands us “to work it and keep it”). Finally, involved in our transformative awareness, creation is turned ‘around’ to its Creator (symbolised in one way by the image of God walking in the Garden; in another by the covenant with all creation through Noah).

The mythical image of Eden portrays this ideal relationship between God, man and nature: humanity is oriented to the Creator in love while they work his creation in an attitude of protection and care; creation is a perfect and harmonious whole which includes even the Creator himself, who walks in the midst of his Garden. The Garden is the ideal of perfected creation brought into perfect relationship with its Creator, through the mediating action of humanity. Placed at the beginning of time, it points to the fundamental goodness of creation, which exists within it as potential and which may be realised at the end of time (the very-similar image of the Paradise to come). Thus the image of Eden is, for us, a transtemporal ideal—‘this is the true nature and potential of creation; it is for you to try and realise it through your action’. This ideal is not actuality, in regard to humans or to nature: humans and animals in the Garden only eat plants. In actuality, countless animals have always been carnivores and it is unlikely that early humans could have survived on a vegan diet.

The Covenant with Noah

The mythical image of Eden portrays an utmost minimum of violence and an utmost maximum of harmony among creation. It is for us to approach this ideal in actuality, though without doing violence to the other values the ideal image implies: the intrinsic value of all natural beings as God’s creation; the greater value of human beings as the ‘image of God’, the self-aware mediators, maintainers and transformers of creation; and the absolute value of the Creator himself. So in pursuing that minimum of violence, annihilating carnivores is just as unacceptable as allowing carnivores to feed on us. That last point is taken up by God in his covenant with Noah: “And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man.” Such is the sanctity of human life that even the animals are metaphorically culpable for destroying it (as they aren’t self-aware, this metaphor means: ‘You, man, are responsible for protecting yourself from the depredations of nature with as much violence as necessary’).

With Noah we emerge from the mythic realm outside-of-time and enter historical reality. Alongside the above commandment, man is given “every moving thing that lives” to eat. This follows directly from the combining of 1) the ideal image of Eden with 2) the concrete reality of the time. Meat must be eaten, not just for the mere survival of human beings, but for their flourishing (“be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” God says again and again, first to Adam then to Noah). We cannot exercise our role in creation if we are not healthy, numerous and powerful. And so it makes sense that in the story the permission to eat meat leads almost immediately into the dramatic condemnation of killing human beings (though what comes between reminds us of the intrinsic value of other creatures: “you shall not eat flesh with its life”). The covenant with Noah follows from the values and relationships implied in the image of Eden, but applies them to the concrete reality where humans must eat meat and violently protect themselves from nature.

The Covenant with Modernity

Our own situation is very different: having filled the earth abundantly and achieved incredible power, we (most of us) do not need to eat animal products in order to be healthy, let alone to live. We have access to dietary supplements and an incredibly varied diet. And yet we torment and kill more animals than ever before; and we in the West (who can most afford to give up meat completely) consume far more meat than ever before. This is not being faithful to the image of Eden, nor to the covenant with Noah, which must be read in light of that most-basic image of Eden.

How can we be faithful to the image today, and realise it further in our actual world? The only conclusion to draw: we must refrain from the violence against animals that can so easily be avoided without doing harm to human life, health, or essential calling. Our flourishing must be understood in the context of our mission: we fulfil ourselves in furthering this mission, which is the same thing as furthering creation (respecting the intrinsic value of natural beings, minimising violence and facilitating harmony). While part of our role is to enjoy creation as well, that enjoyment is necessarily bound by respect for the intrinsic value of other creatures. In Genesis, the command to “have dominion” over nature is followed by the command to “work it and keep it”.

Conclusion

I’ve used the Biblical narratives to clarify what I believe is much more basic: what results from the fundamental affirmation of the world as good, in light of an all-good Creator. I could retrace the insights of the past few posts without reference to the specific Judeo-Christian myths. Very simply: if we find ourselves in a fundamentally good created world, it must be our duty to care for it and further the potential of its goodness. We see we can care for and further it in a way that nature itself cannot, so we must have a special role to play—we must be placed here by God as its fulfilment. This gives us greater value, but does not annul the intrinsic value of nature itself: in fulfilling our role, we must honour both of these values. Therefore that violence that ensures our life and genuine flourishing is imperative, while that violence which does not is evil. More specifically, what I get from this is: the slaughter of animals merely to enjoy the taste of their flesh is unacceptable, while their slaughter to sustain our health is actually imperative.

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Argument for Veganism

It’s really as simple as this. Background: the virtue argument; the facts.

1. You can maintain a perfectly healthy diet without meat, eggs or dairy.

2. You know that mere pleasure and habit aren’t acceptable justifications for inflicting suffering or death on animals in any other circumstance, i.e. you wouldn’t freely choose this as moral, you wouldn’t torture or kill a cat just because it felt good or because that’s just what was expected.

3. You know that profiting from evil is still evil, even if you refrain from the act itself: enjoying or facilitating the torture or killing of a cat without directly participating in it is still condemnable, to your own consciousness.

4. In the absence of any other compelling values: therefore you must become vegan. Not because of any abstract argument, but because that is already what you believe, as soon as you make your values and behaviour clear to yourself.

Addendum:

This applies to the vast majority of people living in the Western world. I have zero sympathy with the notion that this is an intrinsically difficult issue: it’s essentially as simple as ancient misogyny or slavery. But it does become complex on the margins: there are at least some people (I know a couple) who genuinely can’t eat a healthy vegan diet. Does human health and vitality trump animal life—I would answer ‘Yes!’, but this is more debatable: it isn’t immediately clear that everyone has the same moral sense about this. Are there certain cultural (assuming ‘cultural’ can be convincingly distinguished from ‘habit’) or religious values that trump animal life—I would answer a very cautious ‘perhaps’, but clearly none that apply to me.

For the vast majority of people in the Western world this isn’t about working out a philosophical problem but simply being consistent, applying the values you actually already hold, just being a good person, in your own eyes.

[thinkingthru]

Humanity and Nature

In this fundamental covenant with the Creator, what is the relation between humanity and nature? It’s already apparent that when we affirm the fundamental goodness of being we seek to further it, but what does this mean in relation to ourselves as human beings? We have the capacity to destroy ourselves along with the natural world; wouldn’t it be better for being as a whole if we didn’t exist at all?

Once again, I find hints in the early chapters of Genesis, which deals almost exclusively with God understood as Creator (i.e. not the specific God of the Israelites, God the Christ, etc.). Upon making the various parts of Creation, God sees that ‘it is good’, up until the last day of creating when he makes the land animals and once more sees that ‘it is good’. With each stage another good is added: Creation is the sum of these. But then on that very same day God makes human beings, beholds Creation, and sees that it is ‘very good’. There has been a qualitative transformation; humanity is not one extra good added to many, but something radically new is introduced which amplifies the goodness of everything.

When God announces the Flood, the fates of humanity and the natural world are intertwined: “Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.” There is something about humanity that means its corruption makes the rest of Creation worthless. It’s as though this latest and highest aspect of Creation (that qualitatively transforms it) has by its evil choices betrayed the whole purpose of Creation. Then the whole becomes meaningless, to be washed away. And yet God preserves it—man and nature alike—because there is still potential for good, and thus for salvation and fulfilment of the purpose.

And when God makes the covenant with Noah, he explicitly makes it with Creation as a whole, man and nature: “between me and you and every living creature that is with you”. We are interdependent; we need nature, and yet nature needs us, and God loves us as a whole. The meaning of nature’s need for us is that the covenant is actually made with Noah. Even though it embraces all Creation, only Noah can hear and answer God: only humanity can apprehend the Creator through his Creation, and only humanity can freely respond to him. So when Noah makes the covenant with God after the Flood, he answers for all of Creation.

In that covenant God gives us the flesh of all animals to eat, and yet explicitly prohibits the killing of man—not just by other men, but by animals! “For your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it.” This doesn’t mean that animals are morally culpable, but that the whole of Creation is fundamentally arranged toward humanity as its fulfilment. Our flourishing is so important that we may kill animals with impunity to further it, but the killing of a human being is a horror in God’s eyes. And our freedom to kill has limits. Explicitly, “you shall not eat flesh with its life”: that is, all life is sacred even if humanity is higher; kill swiftly and never inflict unnecessary suffering. Implicitly: we may kill for our flourishing but only for our flourishing, for that which sets us apart from all other life and in the pursuit of which we further the entire Creation. This includes many things, but clearly not our bare sensual enjoyment.

The movie Noah grapples with the notion that the world would be best without mankind. Having beheld the wickedness of humans, Noah believes that the Creator wants our presence on earth to end forever. “Creation will be left alone, safe and beautiful.” This seems like an affirmation of Creation and yet great evil lies within it, which soon becomes manifest in the horror he almost commits. And beyond our awareness of the overwhelming value of innocent human life, his claim about the natural world isn’t true: without the essentially human, nature would be neither safe nor beautiful. While we can plunder and destroy nature, we can just as well preserve and cultivate it: we can protect species from extinction, restore and enrich entire ecosystems. The faculty of conscious intelligence that allows us to do either of these lifts nature out of enslavement to pure chance. And would nature really be beautiful without us? What would all the beauty of nature be for itself if it had nothing to appreciate it? And there is one final reason the rest of Creation needs us: just as nature cannot know itself, it cannot know its Creator. Only with humanity can Creation come into full relationship with the Creator. After the Flood, Noah makes the covenant for the whole natural world.

To affirm a created world means to recognise human beings as conscious and responsible mediators between Creation and the Creator. Our self-reflective awareness transforms the world: in our physical transformations, in the depth we introduce by our experience, and in our turning it back around (so to speak) into relationship with its Creator.

But we must also recognise who we are: natural, and embedded in the natural world: spirit and nature indissolubly joined. (Again—mediators!) We are to bring Creation back to God: not sever ourselves from nature to present ourselves to him (impossibly) as pure spirit; not to sever ourselves from nature so nature can be (impossibly) a perfect paradise all to itself.

All of nature has intrinsic value. And yet we have greater value. And yet, what does this value ultimately consist in except the capacity to affirm or reject being and—to take this to the extremity—to love or hate the Creator? The fulfilment of creation only becomes possible with us. And yet—we must take the final step, in full freedom—the step that will absolutely fulfil or utterly damn the whole of Creation.

[thinkingthru]

The Fall

In a way, we arrive at love of God through the affirmation of the goodness of Creation. That is to say: if we affirm the world as fundamentally good, we know that its Creator is good and we love him. Yet we also arrive at the goodness of Creation through love of God: the world we encounter is highly ambivalent and continually tempts us to doubt and despair, but if we love its Creator as absolutely good then we know that this world, as intended by him, is good fundamentally. So there is a positive feedback loop: our love of God strengthens our affirmation of Creation, and our affirmation of Creation strengthens our love of God.

But this isn’t deterministic. The affirmation isn’t produced by the love of God and the love of God isn’t produced by the affirmation, and neither is produced by the evil or good manifested by Creation. The affirmation or rejection is made freely by the individual, and no matter how much goodness or evil is present to him in the moment of decision, his decision is always a leap beyond the data because it concerns the fundamental goodness or evil of being.

To live in covenant with the Creator means at the same time to affirm the fundamental goodness of Creation and to love the Creator as absolutely good, and these two (if we are faithful) continually strengthen each other. It is to see Creation and our being as wonderful gifts and to respond by preserving and furthering them. But if we remain faithful, we refrain from judging. The moment we resume weighing up the good and evil of the world to decipher its true nature, we have fallen out of covenant with our Creator. Only he can judge the world he has made, in the way of knowledge (that is: not because only he ought to, but because only he is able). We ‘judge’ it in the fundamental decision, not in the way of knowledge but of commitment.

The movie shows the extremity of the rejection of this covenant with God. The Creator is acknowledged by everyone, evil and good, though the evil (e.g. Tubal-Cain) consciously reject him as unconcerned with his Creation and reject Creation as fundamentally flawed (“He cursed us to struggle”). Just as there’s a virtuous circle in the affirmation, there’s a vicious circle in the rejection: rejection of Creation leads to hate for its Creator, and hate for the Creator turns back into greater rejection of Creation—lighting-up the evils of the world even more intensely and strengthening the initial decision with a burning spite-toward-a-being. The extremity is that God is kept in the evil consciousness, whereas usually it would exclude him (evil is usually atheistic—thank God!). Rather than quelling the evil, this awareness only fuels it, because God isn’t one factor in the balance of the goodness or evil of Creation; instead he is that which (as its wilful maker) only intensifies infinitely the decision we make to affirm or reject it.

And so we come to the Fall: when Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the ‘knowledge of good and evil’ in order to ‘be like God’ they are turning away from the virtuous circle of affirmation (in other words: Faith, Hope, Love) to try and see the world ‘objectively’, to judge it objectively. ‘What is this Garden really like?’ But that interrupts the cycle, severs the covenant, and suddenly the world opens up to them in its dizzying ambivalence. And yet nothing essential is changed: they are not ‘wise’ like God, they will never overcome the ambiguity by knowledge and will only be forced once again to affirm or reject God and Creation, to voluntarily reenter the virtuous cycle of affirmation or voluntarily lose themselves in the vicious cycle of rejection.

[thinkingthru]

The Fundamental Covenant

The Bible depicts in a mythic way, and the movie in a semi-realistic way, the relationship of humankind with a God conceived solely as Creator. I say the movie does so ‘semi-realistically’ because in the movie, though it is certainly not our actual world, God is distant and does not speak. And God as Creator must be distant, because the moment he uttered a word to us he would acquire an attribute and become a specific god rather than the Creator. But the Bible has us talking with God, and yet only later is the significance that of a special revelation and relationship—in the very beginning this talking with God signifies the general wordless relationship we have with our Creator.

There is a fundamental covenant at the beginning of Genesis. Man gets something from God—being, and the enjoyment of Creation. And God demands something of man: love, and the care of Creation (to “rule over it”—that is, “to work it and take care of it”). In the story, the rulership and care are explicitly commanded, but the love isn’t. Nevertheless, it is implicit in the innocence of the Garden, and without it there is no care of Creation and everything is destroyed.

The difference between human goodness and evil is this: do I fundamentally affirm the goodness of being, or do I fundamentally reject it? Between these two poles we cannot take a stand, we can only delay the time of decision: the time when natural life becomes unbearable and we will commit to one or the other. If we reject its goodness—if we judge existence as basically evil—we will spitefully work to destroy it (whether or not this impulse ever enters articulate consciousness). If we affirm its goodness we work to further it, to better it, to help and improve it. And this is already the ruling care of Creation.

This is us alone in our relation to being, to the world we behold. We make this fundamental affirmation or rejection, but there is no sign of God. God’s entrance intensifies everything: then fundamentally-good being is willed goodness, and fundamentally-evil being is willed evil. The spiteful destructiveness of the rejection becomes all-consuming hatred for a being, and the joyful care and building of the affirmation becomes all-consuming love for a being.

Therefore, the best possible way we can love Creation is through loving the Creator. Love of the Creator pulls us out of the judging attitude, whereby we constantly weigh the goods of life against its evils, which with life’s myriad changes ever threatens to pull us back to the moment of fundamental decision, which thus ever threatens to plunge us into despair and will-to-destruction. It is possible by an act of faith to affirm the goodness of the world without God, but this faith is vulnerable, unsecured, relies only on itself to sustain itself. The affirmation of being that is grounded in love of the Creator is eternally secure, and frees us up to pour our energies into loving his Creation. But more than merely freeing, this positive love for an actual being is inspiring, so we actually hunger to express our love in ever greater works.

So love of God is implicitly commanded in the Garden, and implicitly lived by Adam and Eve, in that they do work and care for this Garden that, lit up by love of God, appears as paradise. And this is the fundamental wordless covenant with the Creator: to love him who made you with all your being, and to care for and further his Creation.

This covenant does not require any word from him: Creation itself becomes his communication. Facing creation, we are forced to deal with it every moment; the question continually arises: ‘How should I deal with it?’ The command of God articulates itself in this continual encounter with creation: ‘Care for and further it.’ Or rather, the command comes clearly when we embrace our human consciousness and make the fundamental decision to affirm it. If we also believe the world has a Creator, we recognise the command to love him—to secure our affirmation, to light up this ambiguous world, to inspire our work, and out of the sincere gratitude that flows from our own created being.

[thinkingthru]

The Creator

In the next few posts I want to explore some ideas I’ve had recently, that came from reflecting on the very beginning of Genesis.

In the recent film Noah, God is consistently referred to as simply ‘The Creator’, by the evil and good men alike. I was considering this while I was thinking of the beginning chapters of Genesis, where God is portrayed almost exclusively as Creator. I mean by this that he is not yet the God of the Covenant with Israel, or of the New Covenant, but simply—that absolute being who created the world.

In the movie, The Creator is distant from his creation, and I think this is appropriate. God the Creator is the most general, the most abstract aspect of God, as well as the base of all the others. The God of the Covenant with Israel, although formless, nevertheless speaks through his Torah—has the attribute of the words of the Torah, of demanding the laws of the Torah, of interacting with Israel in specific ways on specific occasions throughout their history, of choosing a Chosen People. And if he later comes as Christ—all the more attributes! If he reveals himself (as I believe he does) in many different forms and conceptions, he does so for our sake—because we can have a more powerful, more living relationship with someone we can picture, can listen to the words of, can practice the demands of: i.e. a being with specific attributes! But with this God is split into many warring gods, because every quality I attribute to God (or which God attributes to himself for my sake) separates him from other forms of God, which in the eyes of my faithful love become idols to be annihilated.

If I say ‘Christ’ I do not mean ‘Shiva’, and if I say ‘Allah’ I do not mean ‘Krishna’, but if you and I both say ‘Creator’ we mean precisely the same being. The benefit is in universality, but the price to be paid is a God who is distant. I can know Allah through his Qur’an and Krishna through his Gita, words in a human language speaking of human things, but the only way I can know The Creator is through his Creation. And if I want to do what Allah or Krishna wants of me, I can look to these books and do what they command; but how shall I do what The Creator commands?

In the movie Noah, everyone acknowledges the Creator’s existence, but they respond to him in radically different way. The Sons of Cain, the vast majority of men, reject this distant God; but the few Sons of Seth (Noah’s family) remain faithful to him, despite his distance. Here the question is posed: fundamentally, what does it look like to reject God; and fundamentally, what does it look like to be faithful to him? The movie and original story answer: the destruction of everything; the salvation of everything.

[thinkingthru]

Ah! Slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence.

—Coleridge, ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’

[thinkingthru]

The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest; Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: — Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise; But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realised, High instincts before which our mortal Nature Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised: But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, Are yet a master-light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the Being Of the eternal Silence...

—Wordsworth, ‘Intimations of Immortality’

[thinkingthru]

Immaterialism

from Graham Harman's book of the same name:

AXIOMS OF NEW MATERIALISM:

Everything is constantly changing.

Everything occurs along continuous gradients rather than with distinct boundaries and cut-off points.

Everything is contingent.

We must focus on actions/verbs rather than substances/nouns.

Things are generated in our 'practices' and therefore lack any prior essense.

What a thing does is more interesting than what it is.

Thought and the world never exist separately, and therefore 'intra-act' rather than interact (Barad).

Things are multiple rather than singular (Mol).

The world is purely immanent, and it's a good thing, because any transcendence would be oppressive.

AXIOMS OF IMMATERIALISM

Change is intermittent and stability is the norm.

Everything is split up according to definite boundaries and cut-off points rather than along continuous gradients.

Not everything is contingent.

Substances/nouns have priority over actions/verbs.

Everything has an autonomous essence, however transient it may be, and our practices grasp it no better than our theories do.

What a thing is turns out to be more interesting than what it does.

Thought and its object are no more and no less separate than any other two objects, and therefore they interact rather than 'intra-act'.

Things are singular rather than multiple.

The world is not just immanent, and it's a good thing, because pure immanence would be oppressive.