The Notion that We Know Ourselves

Years ago I lit on the notion that I had answered satisfactorily the contention that it is incorrect to speak of the human person as "a part of God."  While it might seem humble and pious to assert that we are separate from God (as is "the painting from the painter," as I believe the rejoinder goes), this self-effacing contention does not address the necessary context within which this humility and piety must be actualized.

If we are viewed as being separate from a limitless God, then we have arrogated to ourselves a spot on some separate-from-God plane, a spot in which we can carry on endlessly about how small and insignificant we are.  The fact is that this plane--on which we are measured unaccountably against some concocted standard of teeny-weeny smallness--is itself a concoction, a fact that renders the "separate from God" conceptualization a manifest concoction also.

If we are small and God is big, then this smallness is infinite and this bigness is infinite.  No dimension being attached to us (as we are swallowed up into an infinitude), we are deprived of any intellectual actualization of this supposed separation between us and God.  We have no independent existence of our own, and we have no basis on which to ground our perceptions of the "I" or "you" or "we" that we entertain with such ease.

The "ease" with which we frame our individual existences is the--lively, or one might say "volatile"--gift of God, who grants us breaths and heartbeats and moments and quantum phenomena (and possibly a fantastic hierarchy--or one might say "dependency"--of progressively smaller and more fleeting time-and-space events.)  The whole notion that it is a requirement of piety to adopt a "humble" self-perception of ourselves as wretched, alienated, separated creations of God is a notion that collects to its objects without warrant a self-identification as loci of the Creation-essence, when properly the phenomenon of Creation is of the essence of God--presented to us in John as the Creation-mediation of Jesus.

We might as well be called "part of God" as anything else--as though such assertions really mattered--but what really, really matters--if we are to engage in such musings--is the way in which it is inescapable that the "part of God" conceptualization itself dissolves in the intellectual cauldron of its birth.  This is what I have realized in my latter years.  It is really insipid to contend this or that about the way in which we exist, when "existence" itself--insofar as we recognize "self-ness" as the hallmark of our existence--has not the substance with which we tend to imbue it.

This is what I mean by the present blog's description, in part, that "we have no center."  We have, in fact, no "parts" at all--we ourselves are fleeting, momentarily space-distorting phenomena that exist as the inexplicable (to us) conjunctions of (to us) more mundane framing phenomena.  The "I" that I am exists as a convocation of contributing factors--as does the "you" that you are--and when I contend that we have no "parts" at all, I do not mean that we are integral beings--far (entirely far) from it.

What is integral about us is the truth--ascertainable by God alone--of the conjunction-result of the factors that frame us.  If it be said therefore--and I am not equipped to contest it--that indeed we have such "center" as this divinely-ascertainable truth about us, then I will answer only that the very humility and piety of which I made mention above compels us to realize that this "center" of ourselves in known only to God.

What can be known only to God does not exist in any substance for us--and this admonition exists for us in greatest potency about the matter of us thinking we know ourselves.  We can imagine we know how the parts of ourselves interact with our world, and we can imagine--though with far less potency--how the parts of ourselves war with each other--but the notion that we know ourselves in our very centers is ridiculous.  As ridiculous as the notion that we can understand ourselves as distinct from our Creator.