Monday, February 17, 2020

On seeing the divine secreted inside this world




Here I try to put together various excepts from recent papers I’ve been reading on the need for moral preparation to receive Nature as gift, revealing its divine glory. HERE is my previous blog in the Noetic of Nature,

First up Finally, Bruce Foltz has a dazzling book, the Noetics of Nature, and covers similar themes, here are a few extracts on this theme,

"The nous, to the extent that it is purified through prayer and repentance, becomes truly the eye of the heart, and charioteer of the soul, directing reason, the passible aspect of the soul, and the senses. It apprehends truth, spiritual realities, and things intelligible, in a direct fashion, intuitively.

In the contemplation of created beings the cosmos is perceived as a “burning bush” of God’s glory.

Contemplation presupposes praxis, the active life of virtue, nepsis or watchfulness, repentance, purification from the passions, perfection of Christian love and requires detachment. As Ilias the Presbyter says in his Gnomic Anthology, “The inner principles of corporeal things are concealed like bones within objects apprehended by the senses: no one who has not transcended attachment to sensible things can see them.”

As St. Peter of Damascus says, a result of contemplation is the knowledge of, “the purpose for which each thing was created.”


"We created a second Nature in the image of the first So as not to believe that we live in Paradise."

Czeslaw Milosz, “Advice” 



Max Scheler, nearly a century ago, also discussed this sensibility at length in his phenomenology of sympathy, under the concept of Einsfühlung toward nature, the “feeling of unity” with nature, the emotional identification with it that is necessarily oriented toward all nature as living, as organic, as somehow ensouled. Scheler describes this sensibility as “an immediate and non-inferential leap into the living heart of things,” one that it is not possible to hold toward “dead matter,” but which presupposes an apprehension of “all natural phe- nomena . . . as the undivided total life of a single world-organism,” and thus as the “outward expression of the inner life thus imparted.” It is this all-pervasive inner dimension, and not some imagined personality traits, nor a metaphysical pan-psychism, that allows Martin Buber to say “Du” to a fragment of mica

The mytho-poetic sensibility is not discursive or inferential but noetic, and rather than reasoning from the efficient causality within the parts of nature to that of the whole, it overlooks this efficient causality altogether in favor of a radically different kind of givenness.

For pre-modern sensibilities—and this means for most people in most times and places—it took an exceptional blindness, so extraordinary that willfulness had to be assumed, in order to fail to see this other-sidedness of nature, to miss the uncanniness of the strange beauty that surrounds us, to overlook the invisible that is ubiquitously, and alluringly, and engagingly manifest in the visible. For the modern world, however, almost the converse is true. In a cosmos that is experienced as self-subsistent and self-enclosed—external to the onto-theological gaze, and as seen from within that gaze, external to the source of givenness itself, since such a cosmos seems not to have been given at all—in nature as it is encountered in modernity…

That is, this neglected, human-forsaken place of tombs reveals itself to the pure soul as constituting, in fact, an intermediary realm between the invisible God and visible creation, comparable to that to be found in the angel and saints—angelois or messengers between the seen and unseen—and the mundane order of humanity

…as Heidegger maintains in the Zollikon protocols, “beings were understood as present in and of themselves. For modern experience, something is a being only insofar as I represent it. Modern science rests on the transformation of the experience [Erfahrung] of the presence of beings into objectivity.”


So, Foltz concludes,

“…the only nature that we will ever find worth preserving is one that has an inside and thus another side, a relation to something entirely “other” that allows us to find it not just valu


able, but venerable."

Reminded me of  John Panteleimon Manoussakis :
The death of art is brought about by the forgetfulness of the beautiful, or more precisely, by our “deafness” to the call of the beautiful (to kalon). In another work where Heidegger discusses art, he writes,

As soon as man lets himself be bound by Being in his view upon it, he is cast beyond himself, so that he is stretched, as it were, between himself and Being and is outside himself. Such elevation beyond oneself and such being drawn toward Being itself is eros. Only to the extent that Being is able to elicit “erotic” power in its relation to man is man capable of thinking about Being and overcoming oblivion of Being.5

This is a remarkable passage—if only because Heidegger seems here to attribute an erotic quality to Being. Even so, however, how is it possible for Being to elicit an erotic attraction in man? Heidegger borrows his answer for Plato’s Phaedrus: as that which is beautiful. 



“Hence it is the beautiful that snatches us from oblivion of Being and grants the view upon Being.”6 The beautiful as the most manifest (to ekphanestaton) is also the loveliest (to eras- miotaton) (Phaedrus, 250d); this dual character results in the ecstasy (quite literally as ek-stasis, “being outside of oneself”) described by Heidegger in the passage above. Without this erotic ecstasy one could never see the manifestation of the beautiful (but, perhaps, only the “beautiful” object of aesthetics)—and without perception one would never leave oneself behind, drawn in this rapture of beauty.





JOHN ANTHONY MCGUCKIN has a great essay in this collection HERE in a similar vein, The Beauty of the World and Its Significance in St. Gregory the Theologian, here are a few excepts from it, 

“The experience of beauty in the world was thus to Noetic Intelligence an epiphany of the underlying energy of the Logos who had made the world, to this end alone—that noetic intelligences would see his epiphany within it and glorify the maker through a rational ethical life aimed at divine communion. The apprehension of beauty became, in short, a matter of divine epiphany: what the Greek Fathers would also called Doxa, the glorification of the Logos as fundamentum of all being, by the only loci of the created order who could appreciate its meaning, namely, illuminated noetic intelligences. 

Based as it is upon the consonance between Logos (as Word of God and Incarnate revelation) as inner meaning in the Creation, and small-case logos (qua rationale) being the principle of ordered beauty in the environment that speaks to the soul of the inner significance of its making (logos qua raison d’être, or the fingerprints of the Maker, 

Gregory lends his voice to seeing a poetic instinct in a commentator as akin to the ancient (archaic) Greek understanding of afflatus spiritus, that divine rapture that allowed an enthusiast to rhapsodize (in poetry, oratory, or temple hymns) about the beauty of the world, or that of human beings or gods, as a testimony not only to human insight but also to divine seizure. 

The word enthousiasmos derives from the Greek for “being taken by the god,” and in this case the god was Apollo, Master of the Muses and the source of enlight- ened insight and art. 

Only those who are specifically and technically “inspired” can see the deeper truth, he argues, for the truth of matters is something that is so profound it transcends mere logical capacity to catalogue it (the Greek for which is logos, 

….beauty exists in order to “enlighten” the eyes of noetic intelligence. Enlightenment in turn produces doxology. Doxology leads the creaturely noetic intelligence into Deification (theopoiesis) or deep unity with the divine transcendent. 




At the end of a long and closely argued debate with opponents who wanted to argue for the priority of scientific logic in world analysis, Gregory restates his master theme that the best way to make deep statements about even deeper realities is to fall back on poetry as the best method of discourse and to realize that everything related to such profundity bears a tentative character relative to the mental and spiritual acuity of the “one who sees and speaks.” 

In other words, there is not, in this world, a single given reality that can be taxonomically ordered and exhausted by any single given method of analysis, but rather insight into reality is gifted in the degree of the perspicacity of the one who sees. The Fathers would call this a prophetic and priestly charism; on a wider ecumenical front we might also describe it as a poetic and spiritual insight into truth. 

To meet his opponents’ protests that this is simply obscurantism, he turns, at the end of his speech, to a challenge back to them. If logic can tell us all that needs to be known about the divine order, why is it that the present order of things, so apparently quantifiable and subordinate to investigation, retains a plethora of mysteries that exceed the capacity of even the most refined intelligence? If this basic world order that lies before us is profoundly mysterious at its core (and the experience of beauty opens this truth out to the percipient observer), then a fortiori the nature and acts of God exceed our capacity to grasp or exhaust them. 

If his logician opponents are able to explain all things about the world technologically, he suggests, it is only because their explanations are banal and superficial.

Only a person of culture and ascetical restraint can hope to be able to claim the insight of truth, the wider picture of deeper things that eludes those who merely work on the surface, never advancing to the logoi of matters, the manner in which all things cohere. Only those who are specifically and technically “inspired” can see the deeper truth, 

Gregory makes an audacious claim (for postmodern ears), but one he soberly buttresses from his aesthetic theory: those wishing to learn what is authentic, as opposed to erroneous, Christianity need to listen to  him, not to other voices of the day, for his voice carries the power of someone who perceives beauty alive in the world, and its élan thereby demonstrates him to be a herald of the Spirit (we might today say “prophet”) while its absence proves others (he has in mind specific opponents such as Aetius and Eunomius, logicians by trade) to be mythmakers. 

....true analysis of the proper balance of the world order demands a cultured and artistic appreciation of beauty, that the true world order is greater than a simple attempt to catalogue it taxonomically, that it has to be approached artistically and acclaimed enthusiastically if it is to be an accurate translation (metaphrasis) or comment (exegesis) on reality, and that only those who demonstrate such transcendent appreciation are qualified to act as leaders and shapers of the dialogue about reality.



This very much reminded me of a quote by David Hart,

"Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason”, but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” – indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail – and cannot be truly known if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know anything, one must first love, and having known one must finally delight; only this “corresponds” to the trinitarian love and delight that creates. The truth of being is the whole of being, in its event, groundless, and so in its every detail revelatory of the light that grants it."

Hart reviewed Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection By Louis Dupré HERE, and says, 

Dupré takes quite seriously the ancient (Platonic and Christian) idea of illumination: the light of truth can be received only under the forms of a creative and poetic capacity in consciousness, perhaps, but that very capacity also already participates in Being’s light, and receives it from without. Consciousness is an openness to the radiance of things. Being is an analogical and expressive medium, whose structures of meaning coincide in the transcendentals of beauty, goodness, truth, and unity.

As opposed to the positivistic view of truth so prevalent today, the more ancient Platonist model of truth is one of disclosure: the radiance by which the object of reflection really shows itself–gives itself–to the subjective intention. Such a model of truth makes room for the notion of revelation, for the idea of a transcendence that declares itself, that is Word and light and meaning, appearing gratuitously, even if it does so necessarily under the forms provided by a human creativity.

Even if every religious truth comes to consciousness as a construction, a mythic, symbolic, and ritual invention, it also comes as a gift that–appearing within the elaborate architecture of the religious experience–still surpasses intention, and overflows the understanding of the one who receives it.”

The soul that understands truth – that ‘stands under’ the reality it cannot master and between the poles that define it – is the pious soul, and this piety enables the soul to know more than can be said, and to be found and transformed by divine wisdom from which arises both the intelligence of the knower and the intelligibility of the world. Thus, the soul that loves divine wisdom, wisdom arising from beyond our minds, and from beyond the apparent realm of becoming in which we live, is the soul of the philosopher. Any other approach to knowledge is both anti-philosophical and impossible as it either deletes the subjective soul in order to have meaningless objective facts, or deletes meaningful objective reality in order to have only solipsistic illusions.”





Anyway, Macgukin conclues,


In Gregory’s hands, and he is typical in this of all the major Greek Fathers, the beauty exists in order to “enlighten” the eyes of noetic intelligence. E lightenment in turn produces doxology. Doxology leads the creaturely noetic intelligence into Deification (theopoiesis) or deep unity with the divine transcendent. Far from there being a profound chasm between materiality and the divine transcendent (a presupposition of much late medieval Western Christian thought, which erected high barriers between the created order and the divine transcendent), the whole structure of this way of thinking presumes the closest of relational bonds between the cosmos and the divine immanence. The bridge is human noetic enlightenment. When the human mind acts as priestly “bearer of witness” to the beauty of God in the world, then by its adding of appreciative value to the wonder of the order of existing things that it sees, it thus acts as priest on behalf of all reality: both animate and inanimate matter. All has the potential to be lifted up in the song of glory that is the creation and given ontological stability and meaning in its relation to the divine. “




Finally I offer some extracts from Nature as manifestation of the Divine, The Divine Logoi and the Divine Energies by David Bradshaw, a superb essay, found HERE, he starts off noting the experience of nature in the psalms,

…that great fountain of western religious experience, the Psalms. The Psalms are full of vivid and intensely powerful descriptions of the natural world. In fact, they are more than descriptions; they are reports of seeing the natural world in a certain way, one that is alleged to present its deepest reality.

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1)....

Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honor and majesty. Who coverest thyself with light was with a garment, who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain; who layest the beams of his chambers in the waters, who maketh the clouds his chariot, who walketh upon the wings of the wind. (Ps. 104:1-3)

The Psalmist here moves seamlessly from God as clothed in honor and majesty, to his being clothed “with light as with a garment,” making the clouds his chariot, and walking upon the wings of the wind. What for us would be different modes of speech—abstract description of the divine attributes, and poetic description of God as present in nature—are for the Psalmist virtually a single thought. When the Psalmist looks upon nature, he sees God arrayed in the majesty and glory of his creatures.

I suppose it is clear enough that what the Psalmist sees and what most of us see when we look upon nature are not the same.

If we wish to dig a little deeper into the source of the difference between the Psalmist’s perception and our own, we need look no further than the next few verses of Psalm 19. 


The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. (19:7-9)

This is not only praise of the law; it is a recognition, indeed celebration, of the fact that perception is morally conditioned. Obedience to the law makes wise the simple, rejoices the heart, and enlightens the eyes. To speak more prosaically, what one cares about, including one’s moral concerns, conditions the way one perceives both the surrounding world and one’s own actions. In light of this, it seems likely that if we were to ask the Psalmist how we might come to see nature as he does, his reply would be not to think first about nature at all, but to seek the Lord through obedience. 



Each thing has its own distinctive logos which brings it into being and constitutes its ultimate meaning and purpose.

Origen adds that the logoi can be perceived by those who through freedom from the passions have achieved a likeness to God. He writes in his Commentary on John:

The logos of each thing is clear to those who, by being “transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (II Cor. 3:18), have assumed a likeness to those eyes that saw how each of the things that have been made was good. For the declaration concerning each of the created things, “God saw that it was good,” means this: God perceived good in the logoi of each thing, and saw how each of the created things is good in relation to the logoi in accordance with which it came to be.

To perceive the divine presence in nature requires moral transformation.

Maximus explains in his Mystagogy:

The whole intelligible world seems mystically imprinted on the whole sensible world in symbolic forms, for those who are capable of seeing it, and conversely the whole sensible world subsists within the whole intelligible world, being rendered simple, spiritually and in accordance with intellect, in its logoi. The sensible is in the intelligible in logoi, and the intelligible is in the sensible in types.

Conversely “the sensible is in the intelligible in logoi,” so that sensible objects have a higher level of existence, one at which their real meaning and purpose is revealed. Just as one cannot understand baptism except as a type of the resurrection, so one cannot understand sensible objects apart from their logoi. The relationship is both semiotic and ontological, for the sensible type both figures or represents the intelligible logos, and constitutes its immediate sensible presence.

The cumulative effect of this process is that the senses are “rendered rational” (logistheisas, 1249B). They then “gently order the faculties of the soul by their own perceptions of the logoi in beings; and through these logoi, as in a written text, God the Logos is recognized by those sharp-sighted with regard to truth” (1248B). For Maximus, physical things are to God as printed words are to their meanings. The transformation of the senses is the process by which one comes to be able to read the divine text written within nature.

Two fundamental forms of the education of the senses: liturgical and ascetical. Each provides the essential context for the other, for without regular practices of self-denial and obedience, liturgical worship is little more than a form of aesthetic enjoyment, and without liturgical worship, asceticism is merely what St. Paul (coining a marvelous word) calls “will worship,”

It is only through both forms of practice, undertaken habitually and with a good will, that the senses can be purified so as to become capable of perceiving the logoi of beings.


And this set of theological insights is drawn not from speculative metaphysics but from the lived experience of the holy men and women...





















No comments:

Post a Comment