In my last post I wrote:
"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."
The difficulty we have in understanding how we can exist as distinct from our Creator is foreshadowed in every foible we display in the fleeting and fragile use we make of our attentions. For example, the Scriptures--fascinatingly--assign at different junctures sardonic attitudes both to God and to his nemesis Satan. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the Book of Job, and much of the book has to do with God and Satan, directly or indirectly, contriving affirmation of less-than-noble aspects of humanity.
What is not usually noticed is the fact that the entire Book of Job is overlain with a canopy of derisive satire involving the limitations of human attentions. A huge work in the precious and sparse provision of expensive ancient writing media, the Book of Job deals exhaustively with how proper piety is to be displayed in relation to the weighty matter of God dispensing calamities on people--this exhaustive examination playing out after God has permitted the slaughter of many people in order to test the rectitude of one man. One can imagine any of Job's extinguished sons or daughters issuing the ancient equivalent of "Seriously?"
An inescapable element of thought capacity is the fact that the alteration of a single initial premise can collapse a castle of contentions. Of course, the logic behind the attentions paid to Job--and the expected rejoinder to my sarcastic "Seriously?" jibe above--is the presumed identification of Job (and any other biblical or Bible-based patriarch) with a people as a whole. One might be reminded of Miriam's gleeful observation that Pharoah's horses and riders were cast into the sea. Additionally, one might conjecture that the effectual subjugation of the armies of Egypt (and the terror struck upon the surrounding nations to the delight of Miriam) could have been achieved simply by the miraculous picking up of Pharoah alone to be cast into the sea.
This theme of corporate fortune carries on into the New Testament, as in the Gospel of Luke, the earliest chapters of which have Mary, the earthly mother of the Savior of the whole world, praising God for the blessing he has given to Abraham and his people. Then the Baptist comes along--initiating that part of Luke that is not obvious tacked-on balderdash--to confront the contemporary patriarchs of "Abraham's people" with the fact that God might create children for Abraham from mere stones. The corporate quality of much of religion--so starkly at odds with the "image of God" characterization of individuals--finds its comeuppance in the teachings of the Gospels in unsurpassed potency.
What is really important to understand is the fact that human thought-capability is rendered closest to most effective when it is applied to the sequential (and exhausting) flipping-back-and-forth between conceptualities that are simultaneously indispensable and irreconcilable. The above descriptions I have presented of problematic individual-versus-corporate conceptualities illustrate one of the most basic of such themes in the Bible. The question of the individual versus humanity-as-a-whole goes all the way back--all the way to Genesis and the preachers' endlessly-described Establishment of the Institution of Marriage.
Adam and Eve become "one flesh"--and they commit then that particular fleshly sin that garners so much attention as the precipitation of The Fall. Adam is asked by God if he ate of the forbidden fruit, and Adam answers neither that "we" did, nor that he himself (as the head of the one-flesh body) committed the transgression. No, Adam blames "the woman." So much for the very first manifestation of corporate humanity. It just gets worse from there.
I will not rehearse here my contentions that humanity was sinful from the first and that marriage--far from being God's plan--was God's concession to merely the latest of Adam's demands for companionship and support from things other than God. (It is probably easiest in these regards to remember simply that relying purely upon God, and that distancing oneself from family and marriage, were the advices presented by Jesus.) What is important to consider here is how, going back to the very first moments of our species' existence, humanity has been faced with what I referred to above--"sequential (and exhausting) flipping-back-and-forth between conceptualities that are simultaneously indispensable and irreconcilable.
The corporate existence of humanity, in contradistinction to the existence of the individual--basic though this conundrum might seem--is not actually the most basic of these exhausting exercises. Adam came to be, and in that moment, presumably, there was in his consciousness only that consciousness itself and the panorama of surrounding existence. That God was distinct from other elements of Adam's surroundings was, again presumably, Adam's first discovery. My conjectures about humanity's first moments might be incorrect (as well as ahistorical or awkwardly oriented toward evolutionary "awakening"), but conjecture is all anyone has.
What is important to me is the fact that my conjecture seems to me the most solid connection to be achieved between raw logic and the actual texts of Genesis and the Gospels. Adam, as he is put through the exercise of experiencing time, requires more and more actualization of himself in regard to his surroundings, and manifests less and less connection between himself and his Creator. Adam starts off requiring an outlet of a burgeoning design capacity in his scarcely-describable-as-work "tending" of the Garden, and God observes that Adam--in presumably enviable proximity to his Creator--is nonetheless "alone." It just gets worse from there, and as he disappears from Genesis, Adam is a procreator of more and more sin-doers and an ancestor of a humanity that loses all capacity to commune with God.
Looking at Creation, Adam fails to look enough also at his Creator. Adam fails to exhaust himself properly in considering his status of being simultaneously a direct communicant with God and also a sharer with God of that third element--the surrounding Creation. This is the primordial failing, and it is not merely pre-Fall, but proto-sinful. Sin arises from the first, and it arises not because we do not behave properly in the world, but rather because we do not retain--we cannot retain--a perfect understanding of ourselves as relating directly to God and indirectly--through Creation--to God.
Our religions rely greatly on metaphors found in Creation to illustrate our relationship to God, but our growing understanding of nature as quantum-and-probability (foreshadowed by ancient musings about things like a ship replaced every part by every part being still the same ship) gives us to understand that the very substrate of commonsense reality relies on conceits about "things" that are merely provisional. God is not a "thing," and when we try to understand our relationship to God, we must remember that we also are not "things" (or "persons".) "We" are each individually experience-centers of direct intuition of God, and "we" are also each individually experience-centers of life in God's Creation under God.
We fly back and forth between these two "centers," and we have therefore no statutory "center." We are "rocks" at one moment, and "Satans" at another. We are children of Abraham or Moses or Adam at one moment, and children of the devil at another. We are, in the conceptuality provided by the Gospels, children of Jesus, and (seeking not to deprive our Savior of the right to inhabit other religions' conceptualities) we make Jesus the pivot not merely of righteousness or of piety, but existence itself.
Jesus is the reality that stands between the God whom we cannot understand, and the self whom we cannot understand. As this blog's present description states, God has no edge and we have no center.
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