Ever Receding Representations

In the previous post I wrote:

"The flow of our analysis comes from God outwards, and starts therefore with our recognition that we are at base lost and befuddled---it is to be hoped that we are groping to some understandings as we make our way through life.  Instead (and unfortunately) we are tempted to imagine our existence as well-founded, and from there we construct conceits about God that we offer simultaneously as worship and as excuses for reaching up with the self-same minds that we have trusted to frame what we are reaching for."

It is from the above basis that we can begin to conceptualize what we are--though perhaps it would be best to state foremost that the resisted temptation to form such concepts is really the matter at hand.  We don't know what we are, and we never will (at least on this plane.)

This difficulty we face is neither a difficulty of terminology, nor a difficulty of misplaced ideas.  The epitome of terminology as a problem for theologians on this matter is the question of the "soul" of the human being versus the "spirit" of the human being.  The latter difficulty--that of "misplaced" ideas--is displayed in some theologians' pronouncement that we do not "have" souls, we "are" souls.

Certainly we do not want to "lose" our souls, as Jesus warns, but neither do we want to be "lost" souls.  It would seem prudent for us to consider that we do not have categorical knowledge of our own selves, but at the same time it would seem imprudent for us to assume that the matter is laid before us as a thing of mere directionless befuddlement.  For example, the distinction between "soul" and "spirit" pertaining to us is a distinction that dissolves, not in a forced combination, but in a coalescence occasioned by the consideration that each concept represents a swallowing of conceits by an ineffable and untraceable--and time-less and space-less--anomaly.

By "anomaly" I mean that there is no reason--save the will of God--that we ought to exist.  Similarly, there are no reasons why any of our characteristics ought to exist.  We can think of cause and effect, as we imagine they occur within us, but for us to imagine that we can trace such things back to some source or sources identified as our "true" selves is the same as to say that we can comprehend our very existence.  We are either collections of minimal original characteristics, or we are single original characteristics--it is the "original" business that resides in the realm of the ineffable.

What we ARE, if we are ever to think of the matter as our business at all, is the collapsing of our conceits about ourselves.  It is the experience of the "collapse," not its placement in our experience of time or its direction in our experience of space, that is crucial.  We have much (far, far too much, it usually seems) in our psyches, but these constructs of our thought-lives (and the endless successions of reappraisal we make of our thought-lives) are not for our purposes what we must think of as our souls (to use an ancient definition of "psyche".)  Our souls (or, in deference to the theologians, the souls that we are) are collapsed conceits--as we would view them--of our thought-lives.

What is true regarding the notion of our souls applies as well to all conceits about ourselves.  As the conceivable disappears, the true remains--this is the implication of any acknowledgment of creation.  Either that, or any protest we make of how we believe in a Creator God is really just an assertion that we have a divine Senior Partner who fashioned us on a matrix of objective truth by which we puny humans and our big, big God are measured.  As our souls are the disappeared vapors of our conceits (if ever we are to think of our souls), so also are our "spirits."  Jesus asserts that we all navigate a teeming landscape of spirits, and it is with a maddening naturalness that Jesus describes spirits coming and going within a person.  To think of ourselves as "spirits" is a thought that can approach truth only to the extent that the very ineffable "soul" of the concept of "spirit" (disappearing over every orientation of thought-horizon at the very instant of contemplation) is the matter in question.

So also must we view every notion of what we are at bottom (or in our deepest recesses--or whatever.)  The heart (or any other organ thought pivotal by the ancients) is just a lump of tissue, yet if our souls or spirits are thought to be rightly-positioned, they must be in accord with a "heart" that is in turn deposited in the correct position (with the "treasure" of Jesus' hearers--in heaven.)  Needless to say, I can trot out the notion in English of "heart of hearts" to claim that a person's "heart" is as much an ineffable, ever-collapsing, ever-conceptually-receding representation of our basic existence as anything else.

For the purposes of this blog, I will contend that a person's conscience is as suitable (and as ineffable) a description of a person's basic existence as "soul," "spirit," or "heart"--and insofar as I have described these things (if they are things ever to be contemplated) as things that disappear into the vortex of Creation's implications, I will assume that the reader will not expect some definitive assertion that all of these concepts of "basic existence" are the same.  Of that I am unqualified to speak, and so is the reader.