This is an extract from a book due to come out later this year but it includes bits left out of the book mainly because they over-complicated the principal point of the relevant chapter. Which I hope they don't do here.
God nowadays is often described as transcending any idea of sexual distinction. Either above masculine and feminine or else including both within himself. And if we are positing an abstract Supreme Principle, unmanifest spirit in its pure 'isness', that would no doubt be correct. But if we are talking about the Creator, the one who created the universe, who created our souls and made us individual beings, the one who Jesus Christ called Father and with whom we can have a relationship, then we might have to reconsider that idea. Naturally the fact he is Father does not mean he doesn't contain all qualities within himself but still as the Creator he is Father, and Creation results from the projection of an unexpressed feminine side of the divine being. So God is not biologically male but, as a Person, he is masculine and all souls are feminine to him which is demonstrated by the fact that souls can only become spiritually alive through receiving spiritual impregnation from him, otherwise known as grace.
God nowadays is often described as transcending any idea of sexual distinction. Either above masculine and feminine or else including both within himself. And if we are positing an abstract Supreme Principle, unmanifest spirit in its pure 'isness', that would no doubt be correct. But if we are talking about the Creator, the one who created the universe, who created our souls and made us individual beings, the one who Jesus Christ called Father and with whom we can have a relationship, then we might have to reconsider that idea. Naturally the fact he is Father does not mean he doesn't contain all qualities within himself but still as the Creator he is Father, and Creation results from the projection of an unexpressed feminine side of the divine being. So God is not biologically male but, as a Person, he is masculine and all souls are feminine to him which is demonstrated by the fact that souls can only become spiritually alive through receiving spiritual impregnation from him, otherwise known as grace.
Is reality ultimately personal or impersonal? If the latter, as
with the god of the philosophers, it is difficult to see how the former could
ever have arisen or how love, beauty and goodness could have the meaning they
do. Ultimately they would be swallowed up, being just pointers to absolute oneness.
And if they don’t have any ultimate meaning then they don’t have true meaning
at all. However if reality is personal, as the Christian revelation
maintains, then life is actually alive and love is real and goodness is truth. I would say that the personal is not a lower, more relative, manifestation
of the impersonal absolute but the very heart and point of existence.
So the personal is not a limited or bound aspect of the impersonal but the
impersonal is a non-manifested aspect of the personal, and it is the personal
that is true ultimate reality. The foundation of the universe is not pure
being but I AM.
And here perhaps we have the clue to the whole mystery. God in the absolute sense prior to creation
is I AM, therefore transcending duality. But when he manifests himself in creation as
the Creator that becomes the masculine polarity and creation is feminine to
him. Thus from pure Subject comes Subject and Object, and I believe this gives
us an insight into the heart of the origin of the masculine/feminine polarity
and a pointer as to what it really means.
For here as Subject and Object we have the two cosmic principles
in their most undifferentiated forms. Now, in the context of creation all human
beings contain both principles within them so this is not a description of men
and women. Reality is much subtler than that. Nevertheless it does point to an
archetypal truth about the two sexes and is a guide as to the fundamental
dynamics of the relationship between them.
And so from the standpoint of Creator and creation we see that God
is masculine before he is feminine even though divine reality includes and
contains both. Numerically this can be represented as 2 (female) coming
from 1 (male) and then from these arise ‘the ten thousand things’ as creation
is called in Taoism. But I should briefly
mention a metaphysical speculation that the Mother is not just universal Nature,
the ground of matter, space and time in which all things are born, the mirror which
enables God to see himself. She is also the emptiness beyond being from whence
God himself arises, the 0 before 1. Where this theory falls down is that God
does not arise from anywhere. He eternally is. For there is no 0 before 1 except
from the point of view of creation, of form, time and space. But the Absolute is
not 0. What is more there is no beyond being. There is a state beyond becoming but
that is a different matter (no pun intended). Something (God) does not come from nothing (emptiness or zero)
even though we may have to resort to an apophatic type language to describe
God’s essence, the what of his being.
But the one eternally is, existing at the deepest level of being. This theory also
conflicts with the idea of the fundamental Personhood of God, his who, which is base level reality. For
the Mother is the Mother of the Son not the Father, and the darkness of her
womb is that of the prima materia
before it is touched by the spirit of God and bursts into the light of
Creation.
0 can only refer to the 'time' before the creation of matter; in Christian terms the 'nothing' from which God created (which was actually out of himself I would say). It does not refer to God himself who is now and always the One. In spiritual terms there is no such thing as zero.
0 can only refer to the 'time' before the creation of matter; in Christian terms the 'nothing' from which God created (which was actually out of himself I would say). It does not refer to God himself who is now and always the One. In spiritual terms there is no such thing as zero.
8 comments:
I'm appreciating how you are unpacking this metaphysical distinction, and I agree more these days to the Personal essence of God. Some perennialists got this wrong and place Beyond-Being above Being, but I think this was more a reflection of the Eastern traditions being seen as more sophisticated than the monotheist traditions at the time. They wanted to deconstruct the mythic beliefs of the old bearded man in the sky, and in the process threw out some deeper notions of the Personal.
I think you're absolutely (pun intended!) right, ted. I think they were seduced by the apparent philosophical depth of the Eastern traditions, for which I have a lot of respect, compared to Christianity but lost sight of the fact that revelation trumps metaphysical speculation.
I must admit that in one sense I am trying to follow logic where it leads here but I am 'prejudiced' in this process by intuition which comes first. And there is also the fact of Christ which seems more and more significant to me.
William: You may enjoy this talk with David Bentley Hart.
Thanks ted. I'll take a look. I've heard of him but not read any of his books.
A bit of an abstract question here - would you say that your views about spirituality changed over, let’s say, last four years, and if so, how?
That's actually a good question to which the answer is they have and they haven't. What I mean by that is that my intuitive sense of spirituality hasn't changed but my intellectual imaging of it has. In my new book I have a chapter called Meeting the Masters Revisited and Revised which goes into this a bit. Essentially what it says is that whereas I used to go along with the idea that the highest spiritual condition is impersonal, with the personal relating principally to the created world, now I see the personal as fundamental to reality and the whole point of the spiritual exercise.
I suppose you could see this as moving away from a Buddhist attitude towards a Christian one. But I always saw myself as more a Christian than a Buddhist as, somewhat simplistically put, Christ includes the fruits of creation in his spiritual approach whereas the Buddha effectively rejected them. So the individual self is not an obstacle to spiritual realisation. It remains an essential part of God's purpose for man. It's only when the self goes wrong and turns in on itself that it becomes spiritually unhealthy. Unfortunately that is the normal human condition.
So basically you’re saying that now your position is that one should “keep” his/her self, but not cling to it too much?
I wouldn't say it's a question of keeping or not keeping. Self exists. You can deny it or reject it and there are certain states in which you are no longer aware of it because you are absorbed in something greater, call it the Universal Self when this is a spiritual condition, but it exists and if it didn't you would be in a vegetal state.
It's a spiritual law that the greater always includes the lesser. You might go beyond the limited state of complete self-identification but your self must always exist as the vessel in which any true true spiritual realisation takes place.
Perhaps the best way to think of this is that the more one becomes aware of the greater self which is basically God, the less one's personal self is the centre of being. But that doesn't mean it no longer exists and it must if love is to have any meaning.
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