No Man’s Sky

August 19th, 2016 by Charles Cameron

Now the great mystery, the unknowable more than human mind as human mind is more than speck, galactic cluster more than planetary spack with us specks on it, the whatever the “moon” in “finger pointing at the moon” was, is, pointing at, the stuff and substance of what the word “God” drags in, neither stuff nor substance but, per the good catholic Cardinal, Cusanus, well —

When we attempted to see Him beyond being and not-being, we were unable to understand how He could be visible. For He is beyond everything plural, beyond every limit and all unlimitedness; He is completely everywhere and not at all anywhere; He is of every form and of no form, alike; He is completely ineffable; in all things He is all things, in nothing He is nothing, and in Him all things and nothing are Himself; He is wholly and indivisibly present in any given thing (no matter how small) and, at the same time, is present in no thing at all. –

— That!

The “That” in “Thou art That” with “art” the link connecting them, us, if you’ll allow me to digress into a pun, puny beside that immense No Thing at All.

You drop the word “space” into an unremarkable remark about “the comma, period, and space” and space, the deep, the trans-galactic space is dragged into mind – mine, anyway, and perhaps now yours – and we ignore it, “space” we know here meaning what “space between letters” would drag with it – we ignore it as though shutting a window, the space station window, the window of mind.

And God, But God.

We foreclose the window on God with undue haste, because it is rubbish, garbage, nothing. Or because it is that someone with disciples end of conversation, agree or be damned. Because we’ve got it, we know, we affirm, “I believe”.

But peer closer at that creed, the longer one, Athanasius’ Creed, skip a few lines and what they drag with them, you’ll find..

Incomprehensible.

To be specific:

The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible .. as also there are not three .. incomprehensible, but .. one incomprehensible.

Or in short:

Incomprehensible, three one.

— which drags a certain amount of sense with it, and the someone, and the entire ineffable.

And that word, struck like repeated blows of a Thor-sized hammer of mind, “incomprehensible .. incomprehensible .. incomprehensible .. incomprehensible .. incomprehensible”.

There is no whatever, it says, no thing or person or process our mind can think or process that this word or these words, “incomprehensible”, drag with them. Such a thing, or process, or person – “someone” included – is not subject to mind, cannot be crammed, cannot be cabined, cribbed, confined, into mind, into your, my, or some – any – high priest philosopher’s mind. Or book.

Of whom or which or whatever it is said —

He is not one who is ashamed to show his strength,

and buffets proud folk about like leaves in a gale.

He upsets those that hold themselves high and mighty

and rescues the least one of us.

–- of which water is exemplary, which “nourishes all things without trying to” and “is content with the low places which people disdain.”

Humility, then. And to erect a hurdle, you might call it “epistemic humility” –

But make no mistake:

Humility is the game. “Humility” is the name of the game.

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Posted in blogosphere, Charles Cameron, christianity, games, language, mystery, paradox, philosophy, Religion, Theology, Uncategorized | 2 comments

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  1. Charles Cameron:

    August 19th, 2016 at 5:35 pm

    Chris Bateman has posted his initial response over at his Only a Game blog, and I’m indeed very grateful that he did, since he mentions there the phrase A Republic of Bloggers. That’s his term for the exchange of posts between blogs that he likes to promote and join, and his choice of phrase dervives from an earlier age:

    During the Enlightenment at the end of the 17th century and the start of the 18th, a disparate group of intellectuals in Europe and the United States engaged in a long-distance discourse that became know as the Republic of Letters, or Respublica Literaria. It was one of the first transnational movements, and scholars have endlessly debated its relevance and influence upon the dramatically proclaimed Age of Enlightenment it heralded.

    I very much appreciated that paragraph when I first read it a while back, both because I’d been working to set up inter-blog conversations during my time with the Skoll Foundation, believing them to be an excellent way of amplifying intelligent discourse, but also because the idea itself sounded very similar to another concept I greatly admire, that of the “invisible college”.
    .
    My interest in the Invisible College derives from my readings in Frances Yates, and this morning, having seen Chris’ use of the phrase Republic of Letters, I went in search of the intersection of the two conceots and found this:

    Three metaphors have been used to describe the structure of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century correspondence: “republic of letters,” “network,” and “invisible college.”

    That’s from David A. Kronick, The Commerce of Letters: Networks and “Invisible Colleges” in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe.
    –
    So it appears that I’ve been an aficionado of the Republic of Letters all along, though I’d forgitten the phrase — I knew Chris had a term for his expeoriment in letters, and searched for it yesterday while writing this post, but couldn’t find it, so here it is: The Republic of Bloggers, an internetworked variant on the Republic of Letters.
    .

  2. Charles Cameron:

    August 19th, 2016 at 6:08 pm

    For those who are interested, here’s Frances Yates’ fantastical illustration of the “invisible college” as prepresented by the earliest Rosicrucians, from her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment:
    .
    rosicrucian invisible college