Discovery of God

Balthasar’s “fourfold distinction” is his way of affirming a fundamental dualism in reality that is resolved in the Trinity. It is elaborated in the final part of Glory of the Lord, Vol. 5, and is regarded as the heart of his contribution to metaphysics. I am grateful to Adrian Walker for helping me to improve the following exposition, which has ended up being as much his work as mine.

1. The first distinction is the polarity I discover between "self" and "other" as I become aware of my own existence in relationship to other human beings, such as my mother leaning over me in the cradle. This is the discovery of the self and the other as mutual gift.

2. This matures into an awareness of a distinction between the multitude of existents (myself and all others) and the inexhaustible Unity we all belong to, on which we are dependent, which could be called Being. This is the second distinction, the distinction of existents (essentia) from Being (esse). It is the discovery of Being as gift.

3. But if we stayed at this second level, we might conclude that all things are a sort of inevitable unfolding or mechanical self-expression of Being or Spirit (monism, pantheism, idealism). That still leaves actuality itself, along with our sense of Being as gift, unaccounted for. Neither Being (esse) nor existents (essentia) are absolutely prior with respect to the other: existents need Being in order to be, but Being also needs existents to receive it. This is the third distinction, by which we recognize not only that existents depend upon Being, but also that Being depends on existents (polarity, co-dependency).

4. Since Being and existents both differ from and depend upon each other, together they point beyond themselves to something higher or deeper. We find we have to distinguish between the "Being of the world" and the pure Act that makes things exist. Worldly existence (the dual unity of esse and essentia) must be grounded in a necessarily existent Act, pure "is-ness" whose essence is "to be" and which therefore cannot not be. Thus the fourth distinction is between worldly existence and God (also named "subsistent esse", "Beyond-Being", actus purus, or "the Good").

But doing justice to this fourth distinction requires, even philosophically, a notion of creation as distinct from mere emanation. The ground of everything is pure freedom. Thus the distinction is really between God as creator and the World as created – the discovery of the Giver of the gift. Indeed, in the light of revelation, Christ manifests this unconditioned existence of pure Act (equivalent in Hindu philosophy to Nirguna Brahman) as gratuitous, self-giving love (Trinity).

Commenting on the fourth distinction, Balthasar writes: "This mystery of the streaming self-illumination of Being, which was glimpsed by Plato and Plotinus and which alone explains the possibility of a world (that is, the paradoxical existence 'alongside' Infinite Being which fills all things and which stands in need of none), attains its transparency only when, from the sphere of the biblical revelation, absolute freedom (as the spirituality and personality of God) shines in" (Glory of the Lord, V, 626).

He goes on: "God is the Wholly Other only as the Non-Aliud, the Not-Other (Nicolas of Cusa): as He who covers all finite entities with the one mantle of his indivisible Being in so far as they are able to participate in his reality at an infinite remove – as 'entities', which are not Him, but which owe their possibility to his power, and their wealth (to grasp Him as the One who is actual and to shelter in Him) to his creative freedom."

Jean Borella

“Having set out in search of the secret of Charity, one day I ‘encountered’ Trinitarian theology… I went back to ancient doctrines like a delighted child going from discovery to discovery, from treasure to treasure, from marvel to marvel…. Drinking in the freshness of the ages, I felt my Christian soul revive. Henceforth it was impossible to repudiate the source of our faith, impossible not to offer it to drink.” (Jean Borella, The Secret of the Christian Way, p. 3.)

An important reference-point for today's revival of metaphysical Christianity is the work of Jean Borella, a Catholic Traditionalist who has in recent years distanced himself from Frithjof Schuon, having concluded that both Schuon and Guénon had failed to understand some crucial elements of the Christian tradition (as

Theology of the body

An old friend of mine (and long ago of Charles Williams), Lois Lang-Sims, recently said that “All these teachings about sex and about the sanctity of human life and the human body have their roots in metaphysics,” which, she added, is the last thing anyone these days wants to talk about. Pope John Paul II understood this and called for a renewal of metaphysics in his encyclical Fides et Ratio. The key to his Theology of the Body seems to me this:

“The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” – John Paul II, 20 February 1980, General Audience 

The same Pope talks about the “spousal” or “nuptial” meaning of the body, which he says is “not something merely conceptual” but concerns a “way of living the body” in its masculinity and femininity, an “inner dimension… that stands at the root of all facts that constitute man’s history”. This nuptial meaning has been limited, violated and deformed over time and by modern culture, until we have almost lost the power of “seeing” it, but it is still there to be discovered with the help of grace, like a spark deep within the human heart. The “language of the body”, therefore, must be recovered, and that is what the Pope seeks to do. But as he says, correctly reading this “language” results not so much in a set of statements as in a “way of living”.

Since I posted this item, a brilliant interview on the subject has appeared with Bishop Jean Lafitte. And if anyone wants to study the subject in depth, the best book-length introduction I know is Called to Love, by Anderson and Granados. I will return to this subject on another occasion.

Critique of Perennialism

Earlier I wrote about the “Perennialist” school or movement. Its manifesto could be said to be Frithjof Schuon’s The Transcendental Unity of Religions, which was praised in glowing terms by T.S. Eliot, among others. According to Schuon, if I may paraphrase, each world religion is like a path up the same mountain. Follow any one path to the end, and you will arrive at the identical summit – but woe betide anyone who tries to scramble sideways off one path to join another, or gets the paths mixed up. Such eclecticism may well end in disaster, as the climber tumbles into the abyss. 

What does this do to the Christian claim that “there is no other name by which we may be saved”? And what do we make of the clear contradictions between the religious teachings of different religions? How can they all be true at the same time? Schuon accounts for this by distinguishing “absolute” from “relatively absolute” truth, and by relegating certain teachings to the “human margin” of religion. It is the esoteric, metaphysical core that is ever the same, but there is room for great variation within theological systems and devotional practices. Furthermore, he says, each great tradition has a perfectly valid claim to be unique and central, superior to all others. Indeed, for the human collectivity to which it is addressed, it is central and indispensable. Just as each man in a crowd may legitimately call himself “I”, and cannot but view himself in some way as situated at the centre of the world, so in each religion the Absolute says “I” and demands unqualified adherence. That adherence keeps us on the path to the summit. 

In The Lord of History Jean Daniélou wrote of Schuon’s predecessor Guénon that he “compels attention by concerning himself with things that are really interesting in themselves, and by his bold denunciation of fallacies that seem to us, as they seemed to him, to be ultimately responsible for the decadence of the modern world. But his constructive system proves, upon examination, to be fundamentally incompatible with Christianity; for he has eliminated the very substance of our religion, in denying the privileged status, the absolute factual unicity of the event of Christ’s resurrection.” The “fundamental flaw” in Guénon’s work, Daniélou says, is “the inversion of the relationship between metaphysics and revelation”. For Schuon similarly, while theology (based on revelation) transcends mere philosophy, metaphysics (based on intellectual intuition) must transcend theology. He says in The Transcendent Unity of Religions: “intellectual intuition is a direct and active participation in divine knowledge and not an indirect and passive participation, as is faith. In other words, in the case of intellectual intuition [gnosis], knowledge is not possessed by the individual insofar as he is an individual, but insofar as in his innermost essence he is not distinct from his Divine Principle”. 

Perennialist metaphysics rests on the self-evidence of the One as its first principle. And thus, for the orthodox Christian, one of Schuon’s least impressive books is Logic and Transcendence, where he struggles to make out that the Christian Trinity is merely an upaya – a provisional or skillful means in the Buddhist sense, more or less effective as an aid to devotion but not absolutely “true”. He treats the Persons as aspects of the divine Unity. “Whatever may be the necessity or the expediency of the Trinitarian theology, from the standpoint of pure metaphysic it appears to confer the quality of absoluteness on relativities.” “Only Unity as such can be a definition of the Absolute.” So “to assert, as one has heard it done, that the Trinitarian relationships belong, not to this relative absoluteness, but to the pure and intrinsic Absolute, or to the absoluteness of the Essence, amounts to asking us to accept that two and two make five or that an effect has no cause, which no religious message can do and the Christian message has certainly never done.” 

On the contrary, a Christian who is faithful to tradition may wish to argue, this “absoluteness of relativity” is precisely what we are asked to accept. Its other name is love. In future posts I intend to argue for this position against Schuon and the Perennialists, but in the meantime you may be interested in a discussion of the question of whether Guénon and Schuon were biased against love at the Sophia Perennis site? I also recommend the writings of Jean Borella, a Perennialist turned orthodox Catholic, especially (in this context) his book on Guénonian Esoterism and Christian Mystery, which is also relevant to Schuon. My own thoughts on all this, on which the present post is partly based, are developed in an article called "The Deep Horizon" which is available on the Second Spring site but also here.

Metaphysics of Titus Burckhardt

One of the most lucid introductions to the Perennialist metaphysics mentioned in the previous post can be found in An Introduction to Sufi Doctrine, by the late Titus Burckhardt. Here we find a doctrine of the degrees of reality very akin to that of the Neoplatonists, for whom the world of the Many exists in dependent relation to the One or the Good. The eide or logoi which are the archetypal forms of everything in the world have no reality apart from God, and the world has no reality apart from the eide in which they participate. As mental forms they are mere abstractions. But as “possibilities” inherent in the Intellect and (principially) in the divine nature, they constitute the meaning and content of reality, which without them would fall back into nothingness.

Inseparable from the ontology outlined in Burckhardt’s book is an epistemology and an anthropology – that is, a doctrine of knowledge (of how we know things and what we can know) and of man (what we are and what we can become). The doctrine of the degrees of reality, in both macrocosm and microcosm, leads Perennialists to reject any “dualistic” anthropology that might deprive the human subject of access to archetypal reality. The human subject, they insist, is tripartite not dual; not just body and soul, it consists of body, soul, and spirit, corresponding to the three main levels of reality. The faculty by which we know the divine Ideas, variously called Nous, Intellectus, or Buddhi, constitutes a ray of the divine Sun in the heart of man. It knows the logoi by “connaturality”; that is, by intuition. At the level of the soul, these intuitions are clothed in symbols by the imagination, which mediates between the intellect (supplier of the “form”) and the bodily senses (which provide the “matter”) for human cognition.

Though these ideas are today more closely associated with writers on Islamic than on Christian philosophy, it would not be hard to relate them (as Perennialists often do) to Scholastic thought in the West, which has survived in fragmentary fashion right up to the present time within the Catholic Church. The Christian Scholastics were well aware of the great Neoplatonic and Islamic philosophers, to whom in many cases they owed their knowledge of the texts of Classical philosophy, and they spent a great deal of time refuting or reworking their ideas in the light of the Christian revelation. Nevertheless, though the Christian, “Pagan”, Islamic, and Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages were in many respects opposed, they were very much closer to each other than they were to the Nominalists of the fourteenth or the Rationalists of the seventeenth centuries. Modernity marks a definite break from the thought-world of the Middle Ages. More on that another time.

Illustration: interior of mosque at Isfahan.

Perennial Philosophy?

The term is used by Catholics to refer to the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, but in 1945 Aldous Huxley published an influential book of this title, where it functioned as a translation of the Hindu term Sanatana Dharma (eternal religion); that is, an “immemorial and universal” metaphysical and ethical teaching, found in all the great religions and particularly in their mystical traditions. It is in this sense that the term has been adopted by a group influential scholars and writers known as “Perennialists”. Hindu scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy, who worked as Research Fellow at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the 1930s and 40s, was one of the three founders, along with the Frenchman René Guénon and the Swiss-born Frithjof Schuon (both converts to Islamic Sufism, the one from a Catholic the other a Lutheran background).

Perennialism crosses religious boundaries but (or so it claims) without undermining them. It insists that truth can only be attained through the sincere practice of one or other living religious tradition. Such mediating forms can be transcended only from within: each revealed religion remains unique and precious in all its details, and must be accepted and practiced as the condition for any authentic spiritual realization. This teaching has played an important part in persuading many people (including myself) to take seriously the need for conversion, and to search for an authentic spiritual home. They have also awakened an interest in metaphysics and symbolism. Future posts will discuss these positive aspects, and also voice some criticisms. Sophia Perennis is one of the main publishers of this literature.