I know someone who lives in a state of chaos with nothing put away or even thrown away, and stuff scattered everywhere. She claims this is the sign of a creative person. I know someone else who is obsessive about order and must have everything in its proper place. It causes him actual discomfort to experience mess and untidiness, and if something no longer serves its purpose, he will throw it out. He thinks disorder is the sign of a disorganised and therefore unproductive mind. Unfortunately, they are husband and wife, but then marriage is often an arena for learning needed lessons.
Order and chaos are inseparable companions, partly because each implies the existence of the other but also because creation requires both. Order, which is what creation works towards establishing, can only be built out of chaos using the word in its literal sense of disorganised matter. Chaos is the raw material order requires to appear in form. Without chaos, order has nothing to work with and make structure. But chaos needs order to make something of it. It is only good as a source for order. Left to itself without order to inform it, it is a negative. Therefore, the wife in the example above is wrong. Chaos as disorder is just chaotic. But the husband is also wrong because his excessive order leaves no room for development and growth. It is a sterile thing.
Too much order stifles creativity and freedom, but too much disorder leads to chaos. On the other hand, there needs to be a little disorder in a system for it to evolve, but the point of this evolution is to lead to a higher level of order. Disorder taken on its own terms and not subject to the principle of order is the ground from which evil, decay and death arise, but as chaos, its fundamental state, it is also the ground of all creation.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."
Chaos is the formless and empty earth from which the Spirit of God forms all creation. It is the deep, the waters and the feminine principle which needs the masculine principle to organise it into order. By the same token, the masculine principle needs the feminine principle to bring to life and outer reality the unmanifested idea.
7 comments:
this sounds close to my own experience, although a less extreme version of it, and in our case i am the chaotic one, and my wife the orderly one (which i suppose is more common, even though - or precisely because - as you pointed out, order is the male principle, and chaos the feminine principle). but a marriage, i think, is precisely the best example of the dynamic, and why i am a dualist in this regard. also, incidentally, i think the two satanic forces now are precisely the attempt to have only one (ahriman - only order; sorath - only chaos) - and yet there is no marriage possible between them, because in some way, in my view, they are both male.
I suppose that in this world every good can be corrupted so the forces you call Ahriman and Sorath are the shadow or negative sides of order and chaos which, as divine principles, are fundamentally good but can be perverted.
I have argued, and presumably you read it and disagreed, that this kind of order-chaos conceptualization is mistaken... I mean the (wrong IMO) idea that creation is a kind of mid-point, or synthesis of order and chaos.
Instead, I believe that chaos is the opposite of creation, hence always bad; but creation is not order - creation is Life.
Life, livingness, or more exactly Beingness should be the primary and undivided concept, and when Beingness is loving (towards God and divine creation), it becomes the basis of creativity.
Life is not order, because order is static of its essence. We *can* talk about life in terms of order, if we want; but there is no need, because it is Life that is primary, and order is just a contingent and temporary attribute.
I think this is an example of using the same word in two different senses. I am not saying that creation is a midpoint of order and chaos but that God creates out of chaos using that word in its original meaning as the formless matter that existed before the creation of the universe. Chaos becomes disorder without the impression of what I suppose you could call the Logos on it.
Life surely is order (though it is not only order) because order is organisation and life is organised in creation. It becomes static when the freedom element is lost which shows that everything, even good things, need to be balanced by something else or else the good in them becomes bad. There is rigid order which is bad but there is also order in freedom which is good. That's why I say there needs to be a little disorder in a system to stop it calcifying and becoming, as you say, static.
@William - It does not make sense to me to talk of order and disorder in that way - I find it is too confusing to try and imagine order and chaos in the same time, and at the same level of explanation.
Living beings/ life, on the other hand, is something we understand innately - children seen to assume it, without being taught.
When we start trying to think of "dynamic order" I think we are moving into thinking about "life" - because, really, it is only living beings (or parts of living beings) that exhibit genuine dynamic order.
There are two meanings of the word chaos, the one deriving from the original Greek meaning unformed matter, the basic material of creation, and the more general and more usual one meaning confusion and disorder. I'm guilty here of using it in both senses without sufficiently drawing attention to which is which.
So, order and chaos in the first sense would equate to the Word as in St John and the formless matter in which the Word spoke and from which everything is made. This is breathing order into chaos, the Word is the order, the drawing together of substance and making things out of them, and the chaos is that prima material or just stuff.
But then in everyday life there is also order and disorder and I am saying (I think I am!) that too much order leads to rigidity so you need a bit of grit in the pearl to stop everything becoming static, to use your appropriate word. But only a little bit. Too much overwhelms the order and leads back to chaos in both senses of the word.
I suspect we may be talking at cross purposes and secretly agree!
I agree with you William, we need both order and chaos.
The modern world is dying of too much "order" - the desire to consciously control things.
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