On Authority,
Creativity and the Third Imperium
A Meditation on God,
Politics and the Meaning of Time
Sean J. O’Reilly
The picture
above, the head surrounded by a radiant crown or nimbus, is a detail from a
marble altar dedicated to the Sun god. From Palmyra (Syria), it dates from the
second half of the first century AD and now is in the Galleria Lapidaria
(Capitoline Museums, Rome). The first line reads "Sacred to the most holy
Sun." The eagle was thought to be the messenger of the god.
History
might be thought of, in the broadest sense, as both a written record and a
reflection of the hidden face of human motivation. The historian, besides
simply chronicling events, attempts to understand the impulses that roil
beneath the surface of time and the various expressions of authority that
harness or destroy human potential. We attribute benevolence to civilizations
that build society and gaze, for the most part, with undisguised contempt at
those cultures that simply exist to loot and burn. The Pyramids, as we know
today, were essentially public works projects, designed by Egyptian authorities
to express the purpose and direction of a society with a complex belief system.
The image of armies of slaves and overseers with whips is pure Hollywood. The
reality is that we have records of worker strikes recovered from sites near the
Pyramids[1].
Slaves do not engage in labor negotiations. The images that we have of the past
are often so distorted by the lens of the present that we tend to forget that
human beings face the same fundamental choices and questions generation after
generation: how best to move forward into the future or, is what is desired right
now attainable, or must it be worked towards by harnessing time and parsing
human motivation? The dichotomy and struggle between what might be called the creative
impulse to benevolence and self-restraint and the immediate and destructive default
position of the human psyche, to appetite and fear, is as old as history itself.
Authority,
expressed in both dictatorship and civil governance, toils with and against
various moral imperatives expressed in the impulse towards democracy or rule by
the people. Adding further to this force, running like a river of discontent
through most societies, are religious beliefs that compel legions of believers
using the unspoken algorithms of fear and hope in the search for eternal life.
What is the
relationship between authority, creativity and politics? Is it simply a
recognition of potential, and the power to persuade or coerce, or is it a testament
to a relationship between the visible world of hard data and an invisible world
of inspiration and power just beyond the edge of mind? The Greek word “kratos” means
power. A series of “oughts” and “shoulds” bursting with kratos is often
generated in human discourse, just beyond the calculations of physical cause
and effect, when authority, creativity and politics meet.
And where does
“ought and “should” meet today? Unfortunately they don’t often meet at the
usual institutional junctures of politics and society. People are often left
scratching their heads at the mindless repetition of slogans by politicians,
and even religious leaders, who clearly have no new solutions or creative ideas
to offer for pressing institutional or social issues requiring immediate
attention.
Creativity
is now, largely, a creature of individual and corporate enterprise and not
something we attribute to politics. Politicians of all stripes tend to be mired
in the accretions of legacy-driven politics and dog-whistle sloganeering. The
notion of “ought,” despite the dismal political and judicial scene, seems hard-wired
into human consciousness, even though its interpretations vary greatly. It is
no stretch to say that how we conceive of “ought,” either politically,
philosophically or scientifically and how
it is prioritized is at the root of many creative decisions, both personal
and political. Do we arouse our sense of creativity to engage the moral
imperative of “ought”, or do we engage our appetites to suppress the notion of
“ought”?
There is a
dark side, however, even beyond misuse of creativity: it is the non-use of
creativity. As Carl Jung noted: “One of the most destructive forces is unused
creative power. If a man out of laziness does not use his creative energy, his
psychic energy turns to sheer poison.”
Authority, Creativity and Identity
Authority is
defined as: “the power or right to give orders, make
decisions, and enforce obedience.” This is what we
commonly think about when we refer to political power. Creativity, however, is
defined as “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules,
patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas,
forms, methods, interpretations, etc.” Authority seems linked to creativity, in
the individual, as a certain power needed to
initiate the creative process. The more authority we elect, the more power
it would seem, is available (theoretically at least) for creativity. Someone
who is able to rise above convention and put creative ideas into practice, in
new ways, has elected or connected in some deeper way with an inner authority
that is hard to “place” and even harder to adequately describe.
Authority
and creativity also seem closely linked to identity. If identity is defined as a
person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations
(such as national
identity and cultural identity)[2]
then identity is as ephemeral as the wind. However, if personal identity
extends beyond the local influence of personal ego, history and context into
the realm of self or spiritual identity, then a host of other considerations
come into play. If identity is conceived of as being related to a higher
spiritual form, or soul, then the way we experience this blended identity of ego, self and soul may become a critical
component in the subjective experience of both authority and creativity. Any
proposed link between ego, soul and self or even God and the human soul, however
adequately or inadequately articulated, ultimately requires a leap into
metaphysics.[3]
Accessing our identity connects us
with a hidden power.
Whether this opening to the power of identity is simply
uncreated energy, as the physicists conceive of it, or is something more
closely related to spirit is, in a way, unimportant for the purpose of the
present investigation. Whatever it is, “it” seems to be the source of an
additional power to create or to be creative that is accessible by all, in
varying degrees, depending on circumstance. What is even more interesting is
that when we notice the upshift to
this place of additional power and clarity, we feel hopeful and excited. What
may have seemed impossible prior to this access now seems effortless. We can do
it—whatever “it” happens to be and suddenly a way forward takes shape in the inner
consciousness. The glistening ship of possibility emerges slowly from the grey fog
of potential, gold coins scattered on deck and a full head of billowing, white
canvas.
As an observation, it seems that whenever this kind of
individual authority increases, the potential for creativity can also increase.
Conversely, when political authority increases, creativity seems to decrease or
become more restricted. This is painting with a broad brush but the creativity
of societies that are “free” is often contrasted with the slow development of
societies that are less free. The obvious question, which is seldom asked, is: How
can the relationship between authority and creativity be enhanced by political
systems and how is it hindered by them?
Many of the debates, for example, between liberals and
conservatives in America revolve around the way the authority of the
Constitution is interpreted. Rather than returning to the intent of the
Founding Fathers and focusing on the meaning and origin of authority, there are
those who latch onto the literal meaning of the document, seeking to extract
every possible concession for the emancipation of their appetites from reason
and good sense. This is often no less true of conservatives than it is of
liberals. Who could read into the Constitution the “right” to loot and pillage
your neighbors financially and economically under the guise of free enterprise?
Conversely, who could possibly read a right to the murder of infants in the
Constitution under the rubric of “choice”?
It is
interesting to note that in 1776, “The Founders DID NOT establish the
Constitution for the purpose of granting rights.
Rather, they established this government of laws (not a government of men) in
order to secure each person's Creator endowed rights to life,
liberty, and property.”[4]
This is not
an irrelevant distinction as the clamor for additional “rights” continues
unabated though litigation and popular appeal. When we consider that the rights
guaranteed by the Constitution are Creator endowed rights, some of the rights
now sought appear not to be rights at all but only wishes.
“Only in America, did a nation's
founders recognize that rights, though endowed by the Creator as unalienable
prerogatives, would not be sustained in society unless they were protected
under a code of law which was itself in harmony with a higher law. They called
it "natural law," or "Nature's law." Such law is the
ultimate source and established limit for all of man's laws and is intended to
protect each of these natural rights for all of mankind. The Declaration of
Independence of 1776 established the premise that in America a people might
assume the station "to which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle
them.”[5]
“Herein lay
the security for men's individual rights—an immutable code of law, sanctioned
by the Creator of man's rights, and designed to promote, preserve, and protect
him and his fellows in the enjoyment of their rights. They believed that such
natural law, revealed to man through his reason, was capable of being
understood by both the ploughman and the professor.”[6]
Is Separation of Church and State
Based on a False Premise?
Consequently,
and in the light of the foregoing, we can suggest that the strident separation
of Church and State in the United States is based on a false premise: that what
God wants is somehow other than what we should want. The problem is based on
something very simple. God’s perspective is not our perspective. What appears
as absolute, at His end, looks very different to those of us who are not
inhabiting eternity. We get to have an opinion about God and His handiwork, and
from our point of view, God has, so to speak, a lot to answer for.
Who in their
right minds would allow natural disasters, excrement, mosquitoes, disease, birth
defects and war and famine to be part of the parade? Despite this
tongue-in-cheek, irreverent question, the point is that we don’t see things the
way God does and He doesn’t see things the way we do. As Paul William Roberts
noted, in an astonishing moment of clarity, as he was galloping on a white
horse before the Pyramids at dawn: man is
more moral than God.[7] As shocking as this sounds, it is true
but it is also based on understanding the origin of different perspectives. Our
limited moral consciousness is based on the kinds of causality we see and
understand in time. God’s moral perspective is based on a completely different,
infinite and eternal consciousness.
If we step
outside the box for a moment, our perspective and God’s can be seen as two
different and complementary points of view. God seems to cut us a great deal of
slack because we don’t have the advantage of eternity. Perhaps we should do the
same for Him. Part of having free will, and not just paying lip service to the
concept, is that we actually don’t have to agree with God and He won’t force
the issue; He will, however, keep on doing what it is that He does until we get
it. God will not, so to speak, lose any sleep over our disobedience. He knew
about the problems from the very beginning and He still thought it was all
good.
There is, in
the New Testament, (and this is said with equal amounts of humor, respect,
horror and caution) a kind of crankiness that we might ascribe to Jesus. You
know, things like plucking your eye out if it offends you, cutting off limbs
that cause moral offense, putting millstones around your neck, eternal fire, etc.
Making allowances for the weight of Redemption and the coming Crucifixion we
would have to say that He may have had a few unpleasant things on his mind. Nobody
enjoys torture and suffering. Jesus, as truly both man and God, likely, has a
slightly different human perspective on the whole time and eternity issue now
that He has had time to consider things for two thousand years. He moved on, so
speak, when He put the Spirit in charge.
There are
those who will read this with incredulity—what does He mean that Jesus has had
time to consider things for two thousand years—doesn’t he know that there is no
time in God and that Jesus is one Person subsisting in two natures—human and
divine? And to this we can only answer: if Jesus was truly man and truly God,
having assumed a human nature, the inability of the man to grow in wisdom, in time, would make a mockery of his
Humanity. This is, of course, not the Christian position on the matter but it
is something to consider. The heresy of Docetism, for example, claimed that the
humanity of Jesus was just an illusion. [8]
I would suggest that those who have invested the most in the static concept of
Jesus as being both perfectly God and perfectly man may have something to gain
from further reflection on the matter.[9]
The notion
that God creates with change occurring in
the creature and not in God [10]
becomes problematic when considering the personhood of God. It could be argued
that the Incarnation adds nothing to God in terms of His Existence but it
cannot be said that that assumption of a human nature, which occurs in time,
adds nothing to humanity, or does not involve a before and after (of some kind)
in the perception of the second person of the Trinity. This can be
theologically sloughed off as a mystery but a further investigation of the
relationship between time and eternity is not without merit or the value of
increased intelligibility.
From another,
less controversial and common sense perspective, we can say that surely God
enjoys Himself and that He would like us to do the same—but that there is a
right way to do it and a wrong way to do it—given that we don’t have the big
picture. Theologians have often been so focused on what God is not and what God
doesn’t want us to do that they have missed emphasizing what God is and what it
is we, being made in His image and likeness, are to do. The purpose of life
cannot be based, simply, on a negative moral assessment of the world or on the
notion that we owe something to God other than our love or our allegiance.
By moving from a perspective on God
as the great denier, we can see Him for what He really is: the great allower.[11]
This doesn’t
mean that everything is allowed but rather that God allows a great deal more
than He denies. It is up to us to find the balance between what He allows and
what might be unacceptable and that is, indeed, what the pursuit of virtue is
all about. Building a political system on this insight may allow us move in the
direction of healing the ancient rift between Church and State.
Bridging the Gap between Church and
State
Current events
in Israel, Russia, China and the United States indicate a slide towards a kind
of authoritarianism that may be confusing to those who divide the world into
good and evil or, simply, liberal and conservative ideologies. The endless,
unresolved squabbles between Israelis and Palestinians, the Russian seizure of
Crimea, the increasing power of enlightened collectivism in China and the
sliding of America away from the authority of the individual towards the
authority of the state are all trends that bear further analysis from a
different and, perhaps, unique perspective. Issues such as abortion, homosexual
marriage and government-run healthcare in the United States are harbingers of a
future that the Founding Fathers did not and likely could not imagine. The future
that is unfolding now is coming quickly. The hidden resonance of the unfolding
future in the present is, perhaps, greater than our common vocabulary and
understanding of history can quickly interpret or summarize. The one thing that
is certain is that repeating the mistakes of the past will not guarantee a
different outcome nor will the clattering of old rhetoric, without new and
creative formulations, stir men’s souls.
Nicholas Wolterstorff
noted in his 1998 Stone Lectures at Princeton: "In a participatory
democracy such as ours, it's important that we each be open with and open to
our fellow citizens concerning the deep sources of how we think about political
issues" (Lecture 8) This is the first shot across the bow of what
Wolterstorff calls "public reason liberalism", which eschews
sectarian reasons in political discourse in favor of public ones. Wolterstorff
claims that the "dream [of public reason liberalism] has failed" (Lecture
9): present-day disagreements over political issues are as intractable as ever.
In that environment, why not give political theology a try in the "space
of reasons"? Though political theology is not nearly so popular as in the
days of Augustine or Calvin – two of Wolterstorff's foils –Wolterstorff argues
that it's overdue for careful contemporary consideration.”[12]
A new kind
of authority, it could be argued, is needed in the world; one that recognizes
that the only authority worth having comes from both man and God with history as a guide for man but not the only guide.
Is it possible to re-create an institution that both recognizes divine
authority and yet limits the human interpretation of that authority within the
calculus and variability of different beliefs and opinions? Can separation of
Church and State be less than absolute as it should be but is not in the United
States? Would a relative separation, with one influencing the other in the best
possible way, be desirable in the world of tomorrow? Is it possible to create a
new and better system that mirrors the same kinds of checks and balances that
the Founding Fathers created while writing the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution of the United States?
Imagine the
world four hundred years from now. What will it look like? Will there be a political
role for religion and philosophy in the articulation of solutions for moral and
public issues? Will there be a place for human creativity outside of science?
Will there be a role for artificial intelligence? What can we do now to manage
the future? It is my belief that we are entering the age of a new form of
governance that I am calling, for lack of better words, The Third Imperium. This will likely be a fusion of state
leadership and corporate free enterprise much as we see operative in China and
Russia today. What we do now to build it, as an institution into which the
future of the world can adequately unfold, may determine the course of history
for centuries to come. First we have to know why we should be concerned.
Where Does Authority and Creativity Come
From?
Rome, as the
first empire of the western world, produced a wide range of technical and
social innovations. Every time you lift a glass of wine to your lips, for
example, remember that it was the Romans who came up with the innovation of
storing wine in oak casks instead of clay amphora. Roman cement was also of
extraordinary quality. Roman aqueducts that have remained standing for two
thousand years are a testament to its durability. We, likewise, have only to
remember that our Senate and House of Representatives are based partly on the
Roman model.
The Roman
Empire was the First Imperium; and the Holy Roman Empire, beginning in 800 A.D.
under Charlemagne, was the Second Imperium. The word “imperium,” which means
roughly, the power to command is
emblematic, on one hand of all external, political governance and on the other
hand, as a metaphor for the internal imperium of the human spirit. The power to
command must be reached for from the source of all command and all authority:
the energy of life. This power has already been given to us. We all come
equipped with it. The power to see it and to use it is conditioned by our
conception of ourselves and what we are or are not allowed by society. The
creative person seems never truly bound by local circumstance, instead they
always reach out to what is, to what is possible and to what can be. How this
is done almost seems magical or mysterious but it is clear that there are those
who are more creative than others, in reaching out to transform what might be,
into what can be. What is clear is that there is individual creativity, and as
seen in Rome, cultural creativity which is produced by individuals working with
or employed by institutions.
The American
experiment,[13]
as it has been called, provides us with many wonderful examples that illustrate
the oblique and sometimes puzzling relationship between creativity and personal
authority. When we reflect on many of the great men and women of American history,
we can only conclude that there are those who seem to resonate with a greater
authority than their own. How did they do this? How did George Washington
decide that he had the right to challenge England, the dominant country of his
time? Who gave the Wright brothers the authority to fly or which government
agency gave them permission? Who told Edison and Tesla to develop new electrical
applications? Who told Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan to build their empires? On
whose authority did Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton
agitate for a woman’s right to vote? Who told Martin Luther King that he had
the right to be like everyone else? Who
or what inspired Warren Buffett, Bill Gates or Elon Musk in more recent times? What
is the relationship between the authority to begin a creative endeavor and its
execution? What is the linkage? And more ominously for the future: what sort of
authority might an artificial intelligence invoke to express its creativity?
On a more
modest note, we might add, who told me to write about authority? How was I
enrolled? On whose authority do I write? What or whose “kratos” am I tapping
into for this creative endeavor? These are, admittedly, rhetorical questions
but they should be considered for the truths that might be harvested. Authority
appears to be something that can be tapped into, and like the air we breathe,
is so obvious that we tend to gloss over its existence. We sadly only seem to
notice it when it is taken away from us or when political circumstances are
moving in the direction of its curtailment.
In order to
better understand the relationship between authority and creativity, in the
present time, we need to return to the cultural, legislative, religious and
metaphysical foundation upon which America was built. The flowering of American
industry and what has been called “American exceptionalism” [14]
cannot be understood without understanding what suppresses creativity.
Political institutions that do not support the creativity and initiative of the
people do so by un-empowering individuals and vesting authority in the state.
The growth of the “permission based” [15]
society that America seem to be evolving towards is a direct contradiction to
the principles of liberty espoused by the Founding Fathers.
America was
founded on the authority of the individual
as a God-given right as opposed to institutional rights doled out to human
beings by monarchical or other political institutions. This moral dichotomy
between the so-called “Divine Right of Kings” and the rights native to a democratic
republic is taught by rote in our schools. However, without adverting to the
real or divine origin of individual authority, as was actually stated in both
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, it
comes across as a headless abstraction. At the root of this belief in the
divine origin of individual authority is an idea that goes back to ancient
times, and which was recast eloquently by the Roman lawgiver, Cicero, between
106 and 43 B.C.
Law Is Not Based on What We Think It Is
“To Cicero, law was not a matter of written
statutes, and lists of regulations, but was a matter deeply ingrained in the
human spirit, one that was an integral part of the human experience.” In other
words, authority was not just external for Cicero but internal. His reasoning
was fourfold:
1. Humans were created by a higher power or powers
(and for the sake of argument, Cicero has the Epicurean Atticus
concede the point that this higher power is engaged with the affairs of
humanity).
2. This higher power which created the universe did,
for reasons known to itself, endow humans with a bit of its own divinity,
giving the human race the powers of speech, reason, and thought.
3. Due to this spark of divinity inside humans, they
must de facto be
related to the higher power in some fashion.
4. Because humans share reason with the higher power,
and because this higher power is presumed to be benevolent, it follows that
humans, when employing reason correctly, will likewise be benevolent [and share
that power].
Cicero
considers the law to be whatever promotes good and
forbids evil. What holds us back from
upholding this absolutely is our human failings, our lusts for pleasure,
wealth, status [and] other inconsequentials outside of virtue and honor.”[16]
Paraphrasing Cicero, we share in the authority and benevolence of
this higher power by practicing intellectual and moral excellence or the good
habits called virtues. This concept of a dynamic relationship between God and
man, based on likeness, is at the
root of both human authority and political authority for Cicero. Later Christian
theological teachings about the children of God are also based on this notion
of likeness. Likewise, the infusion of Divine energy in the soul or the Catholic
“state of grace” is based on the notion of a conformity of moral and spiritual action
with Divine goodness. This understanding of what might be called a relationship of honor between God and man
is largely absent from modern thinking.
Imagine you love someone. You don’t want to do anything that will
upset that person or make them think less of you. This is, partly, what I mean
about a relationship of honor. We know what will be offensive to the beloved. We
must understand then that it is our likeness to God that is the source of our
creativity. The Creator has made all of
us creators. This is a tremendous gift, and in honor of this gift, we need
and should want to listen to what He says to us. Honoring this relationship
means that if God indicates, either in Scripture or in our hearts, that
something is not good, we shouldn’t go there. And we know this. Nonetheless, God
doesn’t force any of us to do anything. He wants us to get it ourselves. He is,
perhaps, not quite as hung up on sin as we are, since we frequently use the back
and forth of sin as a way to stay away from making lasting spiritual and
temporal decisions.
There is, consequently, a kind of odd insult that we level against
God when we say “no, you do it—your will be done.” What He says back to us in
life is: “you do it—my will is obvious.” If God wanted to have authority over
our lives, He would let us know in short order without resorting to games of
peekaboo. We know what He wants—that is the law that He has written in our
hearts—the law that Cicero celebrates. Everything else is just spiritual gravy.
The Socratic dictum that the purpose of virtue is to make the soul
as “good as possible” makes little sense without an understanding of the soul as
mirroring, in some way, God’s likeness. The ancients simply and rightfully assumed
that the soul required additional assistance and support from its original Source.
The respective realms of religion and state authority were also
assumed to have areas of common overlap in the ancient world. There was little
need to have the equivalence of separation of church and state in the ancient
world. Religious beliefs and politics tended to mirror each other more closely
than they do today. What the Gods wanted, the state wanted, and the gods’
personal behavior wasn’t overly different from that of mankind. The Romans were
fairly cosmopolitan about religion. As long as religion didn’t interfere with
the state, the state wouldn’t interfere with religion. And this is also the
primary characteristic of an imperium: the imperium is a form of governance in
which the boundaries of religion and state, or what is called church and state
today, are not entirely separate.
This lack of fixed boundaries between religion and state didn’t
change until Christianity became a fully organized and state sponsored religion,
on February 27, 380 A.D, under the co-emperors Gratian and Theodosius the
Great. This was done under the edict of Thessalonica. Despite the advantages of
having a state religion it should, in reality, be more like having a state bird
or a state flower; it should not be entirely exclusive except by popular acclaim.
Jump ahead twenty centuries.
Creativity and Law Is Part of a Larger Ecology of Energy and
Identity
Ecology is, in the broadest sense, the relationship of organisms
to their environment.[17] When religion and moral
codes form a significant element within a political and social environment, a
different kind of ambient ecology is created than might be found in an ecology in
which religion and moral codes do not predominate. A moral ecology is the
relationship between human beings and their metaphysical, moral, spiritual and
even their creative environments. The law, as it is constituted in any culture,
is an expression of the beliefs of that culture writ large. When culture is
good, the laws tend to reflect that goodness. When the culture is bad the law
simply becomes a mirror of that culture’s vices.
A good example of what is meant by a moral and spiritual ecology
is the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and the medieval scholastics concerning the
meaning of evil in relation to various “goods” with a “good” being anything
that might be desirable from a non-judgmental or appetitive point of view. Evil was defined as “the absence of a good that could and should be present.” This
indicates that a choice of lesser “goods,” than those put forth by conscience,
or the soul joined spiritually to the Divine (or some other higher purpose) can
lead to negative consequences for the soul and spirit of man.
Any society that considers a legal or spiritual hierarchical
relation of “goods” to be chosen, in relation to various “ends” or goals must also
advert to lesser choices, or what might be called “evils,” or those things that
take us away from goals. This is, of course, the origin of what we call
morality. A society that pretends that there are no objective “goods’ to be
chosen leaves itself open to the subjective “goods” chosen by appetite. We see
the results all around us in the many faces of exploitation. We live in a
civilization that has glorified appetitive subjectivity, or what we want, to
the exclusion of moral considerations that limit choices based on the
possibility of negative moral or spiritual consequences.
The negative effects of bad or poor choices can include psychological
disturbances and what is sometimes referred to as negative emotion. This is a profound teaching, as it tells us that
we must prioritize what we think is good, based on larger standards than our
own subjectivity or suffer negative consequences. Consequently, politics might
be considered part of a larger ecology of objective meaning rather than simply
the legal relations among groups of individuals with differing agendas.
Honor and
clear conscience can be thought of as both an ecological and moral consequence
of practicing virtue or good habits. These good habits, within the ecology of
moral and spiritual relations between God and man, help us to be like God. The
corollary to this is that an ecology of “viciousness” ultimately develops
around those who practice vice or bad habits, and that bad habits have a
negative impact on our legal, political and social ecologies. In other words,
there are few victimless offenses within a moral and spiritual ecology.
Everyone is affected/effected by what we do and often by what we don’t do.
A little
imagination regarding the difference between those we consider “clear eyed” and
good, or “shifty eyed” and bad, will provide most of us with graphic examples
of both virtue and vice. There are people we encounter in everyday life that have
“bad vibes” i.e., they resonate with possibly dangerous appetites or what we might
call nasty habits. Those who take bad habits to an extreme and who allow themselves
to be ruled by a constellation of impulses are usually labeled as criminals or
as possessing marginal social skills. How can we understand virtue and vice
from a more modern perspective?
The
discipline of psychology provides a unique schematic to model the energy
preserved by virtue and show how energy is consumed by vice. The opposition to
the instinctual energies of the Id[18]
in Freudian psychology, in order to sublimate and convert the energy of impulse
into civilized action, is well-documented; it is also well-attested to by
anecdotal and personal experience. We know that we cannot allow every stray
impulse to take root in our lives. The problem is that most people don’t have a
moral or a metaphysical map to guide them through the maze of their personal
impulses. As James Davidson noted in his book
Courtesans and Fishcakes:
“In classical Athens, whether the
struggle was between you and the world’s pleasures, or between you and your
body, this state of conflict was normal and natural. What was abnormal was to
put up no resistance, to be continually and instantly overwhelmed. Such feeble
characters threw in the towel without a fight. They were defeated and enslaved
by their desires. They were known as the akolastoi, the uncorrected, the
unchecked, the unbridled, or the akrateis, the powerless, the impotent, the
incontinent.”
Can you
imagine a politician talking about this today? The metaphysical relationship of
sexual energy to the ecosystem of human consciousness and the social order is also
illustrated in How to Manage Your
Destructive Impulses with Cyber-Kinetics[19]
published in 2000. The derivation of power and conversion to creative
energy is often linked (although not exclusively) to a sublimation of appetitive
power or what Freud referred to as the instinctual energy of the Id. Freud
called this conversion of appetitive energy into more productive channels sublimation[20]
and the way this energy is creatively invested in activities, objects and
ideals is referred to as cathection.
What happens
when this sublimated energy “cathects” with spirituality may be the locus of
all creativity. We have only to think about the celibate Irish monks who
brought Christianity to Europe to realize the power that sublimated energy can
have when it meets the power of divine intentionality.[21]
Ayn Rand, in
the Anatomy of
Compromise, noted
the opposite effect of what happens when sublimation is not engaged, when impulses
are favored and the cathection so necessary for creativity languishes:
"A major symptom of a man’s --or a
culture’s intellectual and moral disintegration is the shrinking of vision and
goals to the concrete-bound range of the immediate moment. This means: The
progressive disappearance of abstractions from a man’s mental processes or from
a society’s concerns. The manifestation of a disintegrating consciousness is
the inability to think and act in terms of principles."
The
aspersions cast upon those who seem unable to interrogate or check their
appetites is a common source of amusement. The extremely obese, the greedy and
the cheap, the overly talkative, the cruel, the dishonest, and those driven by
an extreme need to “get off” under all circumstances are frequently the butt of
jokes around the office cooler. Those with excessive appetites are seldom
looked up to as model citizens.
The negative
characterization of masturbation, for example, as a kind of “pollution,”[22]
lasting up to about the middle of the 20th century marks the
boundary line between the Christian notion of sexuality, as being on a continuum
of honor between God and man, and the more modern conception of sexuality as
simply a toilet function. The older notion of masturbation, as an
intellectually unregulated, agent of disordered appetite is now openly mocked. Sexuality,
stripped from any relationship with God, is open to whatever interpretation
society, guided by the moral Frankenstein of positivism,[23]
gives it.
Creativity
makes little sense unless the energy behind creativity can be accounted for.
Whether this is described as the instinctual energies of the Id, Psychic Energy,
Chi or Kundalini,[24]
a model is needed to show the relationship of energy-dissipating activities
that may limit creativity, and energy-conserving activities that may enhance
creativity. The ancient model of virtue and vice makes more sense when it is
related to a gauge or a model of energy consumption. The notion of a natural
life-energy or force that requires replenishment provides a useful illustration
for the activities of moral excess that waste energy. Furthermore,
understanding how life energy might be related to the energies of the Divine,
provides a tapestry upon which the story of grace might be told.
Natural Law and Virtue Also Apply to
the State
Returning to
Cicero as a corrective against all those who assert that the law is “positive”[25]
or that cause and effect are an illusion, we can say that without cause and
effect, or the notion of creation, no form of morality, subjective or
objective, can be asserted as being superior to another. “Not only right and
wrong are [causally] distinguished by nature,” writes Cicero, “but also in
general all honorable and disgraceful things. For nature makes common
understandings for us and starts forming them in our minds so that honorable
things are based on virtue, disgraceful things on vices” (1.44). In Book One of
On Duties, there is an explanation of
the basic human inclinations that give rise, with reason’s guidance, to the
foundational (later to be called “cardinal”) virtues of wisdom, justice,
courage and temperance/moderation. Finding these virtues is the way to finding
nature’s way for humans, to finding the law of nature and thereby what is
right.”[26]
“Cicero transmitted
the Greek Stoic idea of a moral higher law to the modern world. In his dialogue
De Legibus (On the Laws, 52 B.C.), he
talked about the supreme law which existed through the ages, before the mention
of any written law or established state. He also referred to it as the law of
nature for the source of right. In De Republica (The Republic, 51 B.C.) he says:
“True law is
right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application,
unchanging and everlasting . . . there will not be different laws at Rome and
at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and
unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be
one master and ruler, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its
promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from
himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer
the worst penalties even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment.”
[27]
Forgive me
for lingering over the contributions of Cicero to common sense but has anyone
ever stated the relationship between the authority of God and society more
forcefully? Cicero’s explanation of what later became known as Natural Law, as
mediating between the authority of God and man, is timeless. Bearing in mind
that Cicero lived before the founding of Christianity, universal moral concepts
from the Greeks and the Romans that antedate Christianity are useful in the
modern world, which is rapidly approaching a post-Christian state. Natural law[28]
has been cast aside by those brandishing a new creed: that of a universe
without causality and without moral laws. This is the world of atheistic
science and political positivism[29]
where nothing really exists except for what is in your head or on paper. It is
this subjective world view that cannot accept any authority, which is not
granted by the state, as it recognizes only the legal authority of political
institutions and not the objective moral and spiritual authority of a higher
entity—since those things are assumed not to exist.
“While Cicero derived many ideas from the Greeks, he also
contributed some key ideas of his own. Greek philosophers had conceived of
society and government as virtually the same, coming together in the polis (city-state). Cicero
declared that government is like a trustee, morally obliged to serve society—which
means society is something larger and separate. Appreciation for the myriad
wonders of civil society, where private individuals develop languages, markets,
legal customs, and other institutions, didn’t come until the eighteenth
century, but it was Cicero who began to see the light.”[30]
“Cicero was the first to say that
government was justified primarily as a means of protecting private property.
Both Plato and Aristotle had imagined that government could be used to improve
morals. [In this sense, government can and should contribute to the process of
moral self-improvement by adhering to Natural Law.] Neither Plato nor Aristotle,
however, had conceived of private property—an absolute claim to something over
everyone else [as one of the primary functions of government].”[31]
Cicero’s De Officiis (On
Duties, 44 B.C.): “the chief purpose in
the establishment of states and constitutional orders was that individual
property rights might be secured . . . it is the peculiar function of state and
city to guarantee to every man the free and undisturbed control of his own
property. Again: The men who administer public affairs must first of all see
that everyone holds onto what is his, and that private men are never deprived
of their goods by public men.”[32]
The Meaning of Imperium Is Currently Divided
by Church and State
As we see
the world sliding towards various kinds of authoritarianism, often even masquerading
as democracy, it is enlightening to reflect again on the meaning of authority as
understood by the Roman Empire of Cicero’s time. The Latin word “imperium” roughly
means the power to command and was
distinguished from the other related word regnum,
which referred only to royal power. Imperium was, essentially, military command.
Our English word emperor, for example, is derived from the word imperium.
Imperium also referred, in a general sense, to the power of the state over the
individual. Imperium, as previously stated, in the larger sense means the power
of authority to command[33]
and it is this meaning that can be applied to the development of a new Imperium
for the present age.
Imperium
also means the ruling authority of the Catholic Church, which is distinguished
from the Magisterium or the teaching authority of the Church. (Imperium is a
term that is little used at the present time as it more properly belongs to
civil governance.) Authority must be held and regulated somewhere in society or
within a religious or military group or it will default to being held by those
who are the strongest and the most ruthless. We are so accustomed to democracy
that we find it hard to imagine that rule, where power is held by a republican
form of governance, imbued with spiritual and moral principles, may be
preferable to the rule of the mob. A democracy is only as good as the people
who constitute such a system and without virtue, the vices of the public will
be mirrored in the laws of the Republic.[34]
The Imperium
of the Holy Roman Empire, which succeeded the western empire after the fall of
Rome was a watershed event. “In 410 A.D., the Visigoths, [a Germanic tribe] led
by Alaric, breached the walls of Rome and sacked the capital of the Roman
Empire. The Visigoths looted, burned, and pillaged their way through the city,
leaving a wake of destruction wherever they went. The plundering continued for
three days. For the first time in nearly a millennium, the city of Rome was in
the hands of someone other than the Romans. This was the first time that the city
of Rome was sacked, but by no means the last.” In 476 A.D. Romulus, the last of the Roman emperors in the
west, was overthrown by the Germanic leader Odoacer, who became the first
Barbarian to rule in Rome. The order that the Roman Empire had brought to Western
Europe for 1,000 years was no more.”[35]
Following
the fall of Rome, a series of events set into motion by many holy men and women,
took place on Christmas in three different eras that set the stage for the
Second Imperium.
“Three hundred years after [St.
Augustine of Canterbury’s mass baptisms at York], God gives us another glorious
event in honor of the Birth-Day of his Son. It was on this divine Anniversary,
in the year 800, and at Rome, in the Basilica of St. Peter, that was created
the Holy Roman Empire, to which God assigned the grand mission of propagating the Kingdom of
Christ among the barbarian nations of the North, and of upholding, under the
direction of the Sovereign Pontiffs, the confederation and unity of
Europe. St. Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor.[37]
Here, then, was a new Caesar, a new Augustus, on the earth; not, indeed, a successor of those ancient Lords of Pagan
Rome, but one who was invested with the title and power by the Vicar of Him,
who is called, in the Sacred Scriptures, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.”[38]
The Holy
Roman Empire, in Constantinople (now modern day Istanbul), inherited the mantle
of Rome and this was the beginning of a very long dance between the Church and
civil authority. The Church assumed an authority that transcended civil
authority much in the same way that Islam fuses religion and state today in a theocracy.
Given that religious and civil authority are two very different orders,
embracing two different worlds, it is usually impossible for one to stop
interfering in the affairs of the other without a clear demarcation and
understanding of what it is that each is to govern. Human authority and divine
authority are two different realms and require relative separation in order for each to keep an appropriate
distance from the other. Like electrons in “shells” around the atom, the
distance, not the closeness, between church and state is what has made the
relationship functional in the modern world.
Pope Gregory
the Ninth used the term “Imperium Animarum” or power over souls to buttress his
authority in continuing arguments with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick ll (1194-
1250 A.D.) who wanted the empire to have civic authority over the church.[39]
The German Frederick, who was born in Italy, referred to himself as King of the
Romans and consequently [at least in his mind] King of Jerusalem. Frederick
established a modern bureaucracy. His empire extended from Sicily through Italy
and included much of present day Germany. He was, apparently, an enormously
gifted and energetic man who exercised authority along the lines of Aristotle’s
virtue of magnificence. His own sense of authority, however, was often at odds
with the institutional authority of the Popes.
This
conflict between civil and religious authority had additional roots in what was
called, the imperium in imperio which
referred to the state within a state, presumably the Imperium of religious
authority over or within the state. Henry the Xlll of England objected to this
kind of power, exercised by the Church of Rome, as late as 1533. The English
parliamentary action, Act of Restraint of
Appeals, attempted to do away with the power of the Catholic Church and
vest it solely in the English crown.[40] This
is also part of the modern origin of the centuries-old squabble between church
and state.
The
conclusion that can be drawn from the conflict between Church and State is that
the conception of necessary social rules in order to keep people from falling
off the spiritual map can be overdone—way overdone. It can be further concluded
that the authority of Church and state should be considered as an original and
necessary unity, or as two sides of the same coin, and not as separate entities
in conflict. Didn’t Jesus say, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render
unto God what is God’s”? The time has come to end the old, counterproductive
division between Church and State and create a new synthesis that will take
advantage of the strengths of both. God perceived as a “denier” leads to a
completely different take on authority than does asserting that God is an
“allower”. We’ve gone down the road of God as the great denier and it doesn’t
work.
The Holy Roman Empire and Empire
Building Today
The Holy Roman Empire actually continued on as late as the
early 19th century, although by that time it had degenerated into a
caricature of its former self. One can imagine nobles shuffling titles like
decks of cards and vying for the attention of various courts based on those
titles but having long forgotten that empire must have force and purpose behind
it to mean anything.
“At this
time it was centralized in the loosely defined and allied Germanic
states/kingdoms. Following the rise of Napoleon and the defeat of many
different, unaligned German kingdoms' forces by Napoleon's forces, Napoleon was
able to sweep across the nation we now know as Germany. One of the first things
Napoleon did was to dismantle the once-proud Holy Roman Empire as well as
install a number of administrative and economic reforms. Doing so actually laid
the foundations of a (loose) sense of German nationalism that had not existed
prior to this and led the way to many of the revolutionary happenings of the
19th century in central Europe (more specifically in Germany, Prussia, Hungary,
Austria, Denmark, France, and many other tiny German principalities and
duchies).”[41]
It is
interesting to note, in retrospect, that not only did the Germanic peoples
ultimately conquer Rome, they were among the continuing and last remnants of
the Holy Roman Empire before it was swept away by Napoleon. The echoes of
empire and the disenfranchisement of the German people in regards to the former
borders of Germanic Austria were keenly felt by Adolph Hitler and played a role
in his establishment of the Third Reich.[42]
“Napoleon [once] sarcastically remarked that Germany was
always ‘becoming, not being’, but in the long run, ironically enough, the
consequence of his policies would be the stimulation of German nationalism and
the emergence of a united Germany which would humble the French in the two
World Wars.”[43]
The echoes and
consequences of empire still reverberate in Europe in a way that is hard for
the average American to grasp. What is happening financially and economically
in Europe and the rest of the world is, however, resonant with the old patterns
of conquest.
As recently
as 2011, British journalist Simon Heffer wrote, "Where Hitler
failed by military means to conquer Europe, modern Germans are succeeding
through trade and financial discipline. Welcome to the Fourth Reich.”[44]
The same has also been said of the Japanese in their island purchases
throughout the former south pacific war theater. Even Hawaii is emerging as a
Japanese economic colony. These trends
are visible in other ways, too.
According to
Andrey Fursov, Historian of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the
Russian Academy of Sciences: “147 companies, 1% of all companies, controlled
40% of the world economy. This is very indicative. This means that the modern
economy, whose basic unit of analysis is the market, conceals more than it
shows. Politics and the nation-state are fading away, and this means that
political science, with its basic units of analysis—politics and the state—not
only cannot adequately conceptualize, but cannot even merely depict real power
relations, especially on the global level.”[45] The creation and expansion of political
institutions that are fueled by economic acquisition and development is the
emerging trend upon which the notion of the Third Imperium is based.
The word “imperium,”
with its long and suggestive history, can be applied to the present moral circumstances
of today’s world as a way of beginning to recast the way we think and act
politically, by observing the mistakes of the past and using those mistakes to
create a new and more cordial relationship between church and state, and forge
economic enterprises of benefit to the world at large. The emergence of radical
Islam makes this a more urgent task than ever before, as the cultural unity
created by a union of religion and state has a great deal of emotional power. Whatever
form or name the Third Imperium takes, the outlines of its emergence can be
seen in the rise of Islam and the vast conglomerates of economic and political
power that constitute the amorphous and authoritarian regimes in Russia and
China today. The real question that is before the West concerns what kind of
belief system the future governance of the world will be driven by. Will it be
driven by atheism or an open house of religious and secular beliefs?
Covenants between God and Man
The Bible
speaks about covenants between man and God. The Old Testament is the old
covenant and the New Testament is the new covenant. This is a way of dividing
history into a kind of before and after Jesus Christ. This is, of course, the
origin of B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini or in the year of our
Lord)[46].
However true this division of history may be it is not enough. God’s testament
to us is not limited by the past or simply to the written word. We must
consider that God is continually revealing Himself. This is the eternal
covenant. “The Father desires,” as Jesus says, “worshippers in Spirit and
Truth.” This means that we are not to be slaves to what was but to what “is”
and what should be. The ultimate authority and source of “ought” is the Holy
Trinity,[47] which,
in metaphysical terms, “Is” its own existence. The ultimate authority of the
Third Imperium, if it is to have any force at all outside of earthly power, is
in the desire of the Father to have the earthly Kingdom mirror the heavenly
Kingdom.
God’s
authority, while it may be considered in the abstract as absolute is, and from
the point of view of those of us in time, other
than, but not unlike our own authority. If our authority is based on our
likeness to God, then His power is our power through the magic of
participation. Faith is the ultimate merger of our power with that of the
Divine. It is a sublimation of our will and appetites to a greater will and an
effortless kratos that literally has no limits. This is why Jesus was insistent
that:
“If you had faith you could say to
the mountain throw yourself into the sea and it would be done.”
What God,
having given such authority to His children, would have any need to contradict
that authority? It should be clear for even the most casual observer that God
allows just about anything to take place in His world without interference. The
consequences, for good or ill, of God’s tolerance are all around us. This kind
of tolerance should be used in crafting the political structures of the Third
Imperium. Ultimately all virtue, all goodness must be by choice and not
coercion.
If we think
about God and our likeness to God[48] as the manifest source of authority and
creativity for individuals, then the earthly and political manifestation of
that relationship should reflect the wisdom of the Celestial Kingdom. One
should guarantee and support the other. Beyond this, however, in radiant
splendor is the truth that the Kingdom of God on earth will be something new
and not merely a reditus[49]
of merit. If God simply wanted a return of the all to the All, it would have to
be concluded that this is a very bad set-up. Clearly this is not the case. God
made lessor creators in humanity, and in this, even the angels may be jealous
as they cannot change their minds the way we do.[50]
God’s covenant with mankind is that he made us creators and not slaves on some
sort of assembly line to heaven. God wants us to get it—not get to it.
The Artifacts of Eternity
If we
consider elements of the Old and New Testament as a metaphor for something not
fully understood, we might say that what the Trinity is doing in the creation,
from start to finish, is establishing the heavenly kingdom, including Father,
Son and Holy Spirit, in an entirely new order of participated being. This is
not for God’s benefit but for our benefit. Creation, in this respect, is roughly
analogous to what we might describe as a virtual, evolving reality. The entire
order of participated and contingent being, including time, might be thought of,
simply, as an artifact of eternity. All of creation, as we know it, occurs within
this artifact, or secondary level of created being, existing contingently just
outside the Divine Essence.
This means that there are only two
things in the universe: what is created and what is uncreated. The notion of
what is created may be in need of some extension.
Some have
referred to this notion as, aveternity,
or a kind of secondary eternity that had a beginning but no end. Others, like
the Greek Orthodox monk, Gregory Palamas (1296-1359 A.D.) referred to a
distinction between the divine essence and the “divine energies.”[51]
The teaching on the divine energies is well established in Eastern Orthodox
theology and has a long tradition going back more than 1,700 years, likely
originating in the mystical teachings of Plotinus.[52]
“The divine energies might be
described as that mode of existence of the Trinity which is outside of its
inaccessible essence. God thus exists in His essence and outside of His
essence.”[53]
However
described, the artifacts of eternity or everything that is created, are based
on the common assumption and conclusion that there can be no before and after in
God, therefore any consideration of quasi-temporal events involving God, such
as the Incarnation or the Light on Mount Tabor, during the Transfiguration, or
even relations between the Persons of the Trinity must be re-considered from
within a metaphysical construct that allows the mediation of time. This is
similar to Plotinus’s doctrine on the One[54]
with everything that is not the One being an “emanation” or a secondary order
of existence from that of the One, which is identified as God.
The
Christian teaching on the Trinity, which appears, at first glance, to be
radically different than Plotinus’s theory of emanation has, perhaps, more in
common with this idea than not. The Three Persons of the Trinity are one and
yet the One is actually Three. This is a paradox that can be restated as two
questions. If the Three Persons are fundamentally one, how are they One, and
how are they simultaneously also Three?
Using the teaching of the divine energies, they are, perhaps, One as God exists in His Essence and Three
as He exists outside His essence. The two modes are equivalent in that the
One is what is predicated from the perspective of eternity and Existence, and the
Triune is what is glimpsed from the perspective of essence and time.
The
traditional teaching in this regard is that the paradox consists of the One
also being fundamentally Three, not One and then Three but this presupposes an
opposition of time and eternity in God. We are, perhaps, looking at it the
problem with the wrong filters.
When God regards Himself, (as He does
eternally) He also sees Himself in all the possible ways that He might be seen
and understood. Imagine that thousands of races across the universe have seen
the face of God and that He has always seen through all these eyes—ours and theirs—yesterday,
today and for all the tomorrows to ever be.
The division
of everything that exists into what is Uncreated and Created may reiterate this
dual modality of God’s Existence. Existence doesn’t exist[55]
because it doesn’t come forth from anything other than Itself and yet it does
exist precisely because its existence is self-caused—in and through Itself. When
creation occurs, it must occur in time because creation presumes a before and
after. Creation involves a kind of immediate downshifting to essence in time and
then a long, slow upshifting back to Existence and Eternity via evolution and
redemption. Time is the clutch in the machinery of eternity.
There is no
effort on God’s part to shift gears and create, and creation occurs out of
nothing—no-thing except time as the necessary result of creation. The before
and after is in relation to the thing created, not in the Creator but in the
contingent existence of the thing created that has been known from eternity. If
it is true that time and everything in it has been known from eternity, then
this knowledge is not, however, quite the same thing as nothing. It is, in the
words of Dun Scotus, an ens diminutum,
a little being. The notion of a “little being” points to the potential paradox
of eternal time. If it is true that the matter and energy of the universe has
always existed, then it may be that God’s binary mode of existence will help
bridge the gap between atheism and religion. The argument is really between whether
or not God is personal or impersonal. God as both One and Three enables a
bridging of both arguments.
From God’s
perspective, His existence in His Essence and outside His Essence are one and
the same thing. The created creator of time is God the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. We might say that the two modalities are ontologically irrelevant from
the point of view of Existence but also, and simultaneously, ontologically
relevant from the perspective of Essence. This is, again, only an analogical
way of attempting to grasp the relationship between eternity and time and
existence and essence. This is also why time is important. God’s existence
outside of Himself is not an illusion or a ghostly emanation but an integral
expression of His own eternal existence in different modalities. As it says in
Revelation 1:8:
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is
and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
God’s
knowing of Himself, as the Alpha and the Omega or the beginning and the end, necessarily leads to the creation of
the “energies” and, consequently, time and space which is simply the Infinite,
mirrored as a kind of elaborate space-time geometry expressing dimension and duration
in all possible directions at once.[56]
The paradox can be stated: could there ever have been a time when God did not
know how and why He might be imitated?
God and Time
Thomas
Aquinas insisted that God and His ideas were one in the Divine Essence. God
does not, at one time, have an idea about us and the universe and then, at
another time, have a different idea. It is all at once in eternity. There could
not be a time when God did not know why and how He might be imitated. We could
also say that within God there is no necessary reason to distinguish between
time and eternity. Within, so to speak, the Act of God’s Existence, the
knowledge of time is One with that Act, and is only other than that Act, outside of God’s existence within His Divine
Essence. There is, in this formulation (to repeat below) the hint of an
immediate relationship between time and eternity, mediated by God’s own
Existence in two modalities. Time is infinitely expanded in both directions and
englobed by God’s own knowledge of Himself both as He is and as he might be
known. What is St. Thomas Aquinas’s
notion of participation but a kind of virtual reality whereby what is eternal
shares something of itself with what is created? What is created is a plurality[57]
consisting of God and man.
There could not be a time when God,
in His own eternity, did not know why and how He might be imitated and this
knowledge represents a plurality of consciousness—God’s and ours.
This
assertion could be viewed analogously (and this is a very broad analogy) as a
virtual reality embedded in a space-time similar to a Mobius strip, also known
as a twisted cylinder, in which a two dimensional object (usually a strip of
paper) rotates through three dimensional space to turn back on itself. God’s
knowledge of Himself necessarily includes all of the ways in which He could be
known and like a Mobius strip, simultaneously reveals and hides itself, in the
way that any beginning point of the strip is also simultaneously the end of the
strip. The relationship of time and eternity, when compared to a Mobius strip,
might also be predicated of essence and Existence. They are two sides of some
original unity. The side you see is based on whether you are looking at the
starting point as the beginning or the end point. Eternity makes no conceptual
sense unless it can be contrasted with time. Likewise non-contingent Existence
would have no contrast or no external intelligibility without the contingency
of essence. Time as the expression of something completely eternal and
radically non-contingent[58]
would, in fact, be already contained, as a mirrored possibility, within this
radical non-contingency
.
Physicist David Bohm hypothesized that there are two kinds of order in nature: what he called the
explicate order (the stuff that we
see) and a hidden implicate order. The
implicate order for Bohm was a way of acknowledging how quantum mechanics
reveals a hidden order where our world is influenced by the whole of all possible
states. God, in
knowing Himself in all the ways in which he might be imitated, could be said to
be the sum of all possible states from the perspective of eternity. The
implicate order is could be used analogically to help illustrate the actus
essendi of Aquinas.
The actus essendi of Aquinas, if I
understand it correctly, is indicative of two modes of being: Being as the
uncreated Divine Essence and being as it
is given to and participated in by creatures. The mystery of the essential
order, in Thomism, is that both essence/form and the contingent existence that
maintains that essence, as form, are both
given by God in creation but God Himself undergoes no change in the process. He
remains completely free of any sort of contingency or process related to
contingency. In other words, the Christian God is not bound to any “system” or
the explicate order but to His own Essence and that is not a system, as we
might conceive of it, but rather the ultimate freedom and radical
non-contingency of Existence Itself—the “I am who am” of the Old Testament and
the implicate ordering principle of the universe. The paradox emerges when we
attempt to consider the relationship between the radically non-contingent
Existence of God and the contingent universe that we see all around us. That
there is a relationship seems obvious but how can the relationship be stated
with any degree of clarity? How can we explain, for example, these words of
Jesus in the Gospel of John, 14:16 without invoking a profound relationship
between time and eternity?
“And
I will ask the Father,
and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always,
the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept,
because it neither sees nor knows him.
But you know him, because he remains with you,
and will be in you.”
and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always,
the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept,
because it neither sees nor knows him.
But you know him, because he remains with you,
and will be in you.”
The goal of
religion, theology and metaphysics over the past five thousand years has been,
to put it in the broadest terms, to explore this puzzling and mysterious
relationship between the uncreated and the created or, using Bohm’s hypothesis
analogically, the implicate and the explicate order. Does the change just occur
in the created with no change occurring in God or is God somehow involved in
the process as more than just the Unmoved Mover? From the perspective of
Existence and eternity there is no reciprocal involvement but there appears to
be some sort of reciprocity via the virtual construct that allows God to
interpenetrate time so that he can be seen and understood. How does the
implicate order affect the explicate order?
Who could
understand God in his own nature without the assistance of a construct or what
might be called the visible architecture of participation? St. Thomas refers
repeatedly to the notion of participation but speaks little, to the best of my
knowledge, about how this participation is actually structured in relation to
time and eternity. The essential order or the world of forms indicates the
bridgework but not the way in which time is administered and parsed[59]
by eternity.
Imagine
Aquinas’s essences or forms analogous to the “integral” of mathematics, which
is an object that can be interpreted as an area or a generalization of area. The integral in this context is an expression of eternity with limits.
Every definition of an integral is based on a particular measure or ratio. What is the ratio of time over eternal or infinite time? When
you look closely at metaphysics and theology you see the outlines of a non-mathematical
calculus[60] seeking a more perfect
expression.
The God of Physics and Theology
Albert
Einstein, who viewed existence in the space-time of four dimensions (height,
width, length and time) instead of just three, concluded in his later years that
the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. Think of this, in a
way, as the presence of the eternal englobing time in such a way as to both
deposit time in the explicate order as sequential and simultaneously retain it
in the implicate order as eternal or infinite time.
“Einstein's
belief in an undivided solid reality was clear to him, so much so that he
completely rejected the separation we experience as the moment of now. He
believed there is no true division between past and future, there is rather a
single existence. His most descriptive testimony to this faith came when his
lifelong friend Besso died. Einstein wrote a letter to Besso's family, saying
that although Besso had preceded him in death it was of no consequence, "...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and
future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."[61]
“In fact, it may be that space must include all possibilities
in order to seem empty to us. So in summary, the universe we see is just a
fragment nested in a timeless (everything) whole, rather than a single material
world magically arisen above some primordial nothing. All universes exist
without beginning or end in the ultimate arena of time, and each moment we
experience exists forever.”[62]
“Einstein
was followed in time by the colorful and brilliant Richard Feynman. Feynman
developed the most effective and explanatory interpretation of quantum
mechanics that had yet been developed, known today as Sum over Histories. Just as Einstein's own Relativity Theory led
Einstein to reject time, Feynman’s Sum over Histories theory led him to
describe time simply as a direction in space. Feynman’s theory states that the
probability of an event is determined by summing together all the possible
histories of that event. For example, for a particle moving from point A to B
we imagine the particle traveling every possible path, curved paths,
oscillating paths, squiggly paths, even backward in time and forward in time
paths. Each path has an amplitude, and when summed the vast majority of all
these amplitudes add up to zero, and all that remains is the comparably few
histories that abide by the laws and forces of nature. Sum over histories
indicates the direction of our ordinary clock time is simply a path in space
which is more probable than the more exotic directions time might have taken
otherwise.”[63]
“Other
worlds are just other directions in space, some less probable, some equally as
probable as the one direction we experience. And sometimes our world represents
the unlikely path. Feynman's summing of all possible histories could be
described as the first timeless description of a multitude of space-time worlds
all existing simultaneously. In a recent paper entitled Cosmology From the Top
Down, Professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge writes; “Some people make a great mystery of the
multi-universe, or the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum theory, but to me,
these are just different expressions of the Feynman path integral.”[64] (Note that an integral is a mathematical
object that can be interpreted as an area or a
generalization of area. Integrals, together
with derivatives
as a rate of change, are the fundamental objects of calculus.)
Now
it must be stated at this juncture that a God Who Is His Own Existence has a
great deal in common with scientific atheism and the First Law of
Thermodynamics, which states simply that: energy
is neither created nor destroyed. Arguing that God makes Himself be is,
perhaps, one rung above the notion that energy is neither created nor destroyed
but it is very important to look at the political and social consequences of
holding to one or the other of these two different perspectives.
A God who is
His own existence leads inexorably to either the Aristotelian notion of the
Unmoved Mover who was somewhat impersonal, or to the highly personal Christian
God involved in human affairs. Holding to the scientific point of view that
energy is neither created nor destroyed leads, ultimately, to the kind of
positivism that we are currently seeing in our political and legal system.
Existence, taken as a given, is simply like Play Dough to be shaped in any way
that common agreement sees fit. Existence, from this perspective, has no power
to shape human moral or spiritual life except as a neutral motor force
translated into various and relativistic belief systems.
It is,
perhaps, an indication of how far both camps may have drifted from the truth
when neither can admit to the essential similarity of the basic argument, which
is in the very broadest sense that existence is not created. Existence can be
assumed as a given but the failure to interrogate existence for further
intelligibility is no less reprehensible on the part of atheists than it is on
the part of clerics who use it as a kind of super glue to make all the bits
stick together.
Orthodox
Christianity insists that God is simultaneously One and yet mysteriously Three
at the same time. However it should be clear that this is not, on the face of
it, logically possible without adverting to paradox. It is likely not possible
for there to be movement between the Three Persons of the Trinity and various
exchanges of regard or affection without the element of time, divinized or
otherwise. The only way to dispense with the notion of time is to pretend that
it is suspended or disregarded in some way by the fundamental unity and power of
the self-creating Act of Existence, which obliterates all accidents and allows distinction
only by way of shadows.
“Thomas Aquinas made a
categorical distinction between eternity and forever. Eternity, he said, is
timelessness; forever is endless time. The former is not rooted within a
temporal framework whereas the latter is. "Eternity is a now;
time has a now and then." Eternity
cannot be divided whereas time can be.”[65] Norman Geisler and H. Wayne
House described it this way: Endless time is not eternity: it is just more of
time. Eternity differs in essence, not merely accidentally in quantity. Endless
time is an elongation of time. More of the same thing is essentially the same
thing. … There is a crucial difference between the "now" of time and
the "now" of eternity…. The "now" of time moves; the
"now" of eternity does not move in any way.”[66]
This is an elegant argument but
one which may be flawed. When you inject, so to speak, infinity into time you
don’t just get more time, you get an infinite now with the notion of “then”
only as a derivative function of eternal time. The distinction may seem
unimportant at first glance but understanding that the function of infinity is
not just to extend in a linear fashion backwards and forwards but in a
geometric explosion of multi-dimensional time paths changes the way we might
think about eternity.
If we accept
that the Second Person of the Trinity walked upon the earth, it might make more
sense to assume that everything we can and will know about God occurs in some
sort of time—either now or in the presence of an eternity that is constantly
illuminating time. This is what is meant by considering time as an artifact of
eternity within the structure of participation. Time is a manifestation of the
infinite time of eternity, an integral with derivatives that might be expressed
in the sequential, derivative terms implied by a slope.
The Beatific
Vision, for example, is a participation in the One, the True, the Good and the
eternal but our translation of that vision, given that we are composed beings
of matter and form, will always be one that involves some sort of time. Without
time there is no intelligibility for the human mind. God’s intelligibility is
only fully intelligible to God and He is One in eternity (“I am who Am.”) and
Three in sequential time.
The old
argument between atheism and theology is largely dismantelled if the notion of
Existence as being eternally intelligible in an endless potentiation of reality
is accepted as the birthright of all humanity. Those who claim Existence is
unintelligible are the enemies of all progress and, ultimately, of mankind.
Progress requires a constant movement from unintelligibility to intelligibility,
from potentiality to actuality and from scarcity to abundance. Any embrace of
the notion of scarcity is niggardly cosmology and bad theology.
The Dance between Existence and the
Divine Energies
Aquinas, the
absolute master of theology, and unequaled in broadness of mind, except for and
only possibly by Aristotle, deftly substituted the Holy Trinity for Aristotle’s
Unmoved Mover, replacing what was fundamentally faceless with Three Faces but
the mystery remained. Whether the “creator” is considered a faceless Unmoved
Mover or a God who is Three Persons sharing One, Divine Essence, the mediation
of existence between the creator and what is created, remains an endless source
of puzzlement. If God remains utterly removed from what is created, except as a
kind of invisible power source being at right angles, as it were, from our own
consciousness, we safely retain the majesty of God but gain very little additional
intelligibility outside of “just accept it” within the given formulations of
Aquinas and the schoolmen.[67]
Fortunately,
what is one and the same in God may be further elaborated and understood in
terms of the two modes of God’s existence—in
His essence and outside His essence. This is, in fact, one way of describing
the paradoxical nature of God’s existence[68]
or the mysterious dance between the “little” being of contingent existence and
the “big” Being of God’s existence in His Divine Essence. God’s existence in
the Divine Essence does not constitute existence, in the common sense of the
word, as existing out of or within a matrix. However, His existence outside the
Divine Essence (only virtually so in the actus essendi or the divine energies) provides
us with a rich source of intelligibility, which can further enhance our
understanding of God’s Existence as Three Persons within one Divine Essence. It
is no less mysterious but it is more immediately approachable and resonates
with what we see in the universe around us. The famous double helix of DNA, for
example, may be a direct result of the interaction between time and eternity
and might, at some future date, be considered a metaphor for the binary nature
of Existence. Think of it as God’s signature on the molecules of life.
It is,
perhaps, an overly obvious statement but the more we understand of God, the
better we are able understand ourselves. We can see, for example, that the
commonplace division of human consciousness into ego and self is resonant with
the notion that we have an eternal aspect in the mind of God relating to the
notion of soul and a temporal, egoistic aspect, which is our knot of personal
history within time.
What had
previously existed, only in the One perfection of the Trinity, has been shared and
not just shared in the abstract but really and truly shared.[69]
This sharing occurs in time; it has a beginning even if it has no end. What is
created and shared is truly distinct from the uncreated Creator and what has
been created and shared encompasses more theological territory than may have
been adverted to. Heaven and Hell are created artifacts and the birth of Jesus
Christ occurred within the artifact known as time.[70]
Hell, for example, did not exist until the angels fell.
The
Incarnation, however it may have been contained, pre-eminently, in the eternal
will and infinite attributes of the Three Persons, occurred in time. Jesus
Christ the man has always either existed in the eternal Trinity (and only
appeared in time as an effect of eternity without any change in God) or He
hasn’t. If the personhood of Jesus, as both man and God, hasn’t always existed
within the Trinity, we are faced with the conclusion that there is a fundamental
difference between the personhood of Jesus Christ the man, and Christ as the
second person of the Trinity. A substantial difference between the second
person of the Trinity, who assumed a human nature, and the personhood of Jesus
Christ is not possible, since there is no time or composition in God—unless we
assert the two modalities of God’s existence. There is a hint of this in
Jesus’s modest and yet puzzling response to the ruler who questioned him about
what he had to do to obtain eternal life.[71]
If Jesus Christ
has always existed as the eternal Son, and however this may be expressed in the
language of effect, without causal change in the Divine Essence, there is the
risk of a kind of neo-Docetism whereby his humanity would be merely an “effective”
expression of His divinity in the accidental[73]
manner that colors appear in objects. In other words, Jesus’s divinity would so
overwhelm his humanity, as to make it irrelevant. This would seem not to be the
case as indicated by Jesus’s cry on the cross as He was dying: “My God my God,
why have you forsaken me?”
Theologians
will say that God’s Divinity so perfectly respects His humanity that there is
no conflict between the two. If that is the case then it may be asserted that
God’s relationship with time, in the two modalities of His existence, subjected
Jesus to the limitations of time, irrespective of His Divine origin. This
cannot simply be glossed over; it has real metaphysical, theological and
scientific consequences.
The Incarnation, life and death of
Jesus Christ is, in fact, theological proof that the divine energies exist and
that God can and does exist outside of the Divine essence.[74]
There is the
echo of an analogy here between what we see in physics, in terms of particle
and wave, and the notion of locality and non-locality. That is to say when something
is observed the wave form collapses. A particle may be considered non-local
without direct observation and local when observed. What this means in terms of
the two modes of God’s existence is that when God observes Himself, as other
than Himself or how He might be imitated, He goes local or exists outside the
Divine Essence. His non-local modality might be said to be, simply, Existence
and his local manifestations more closely related to the essential order.
There is also
a hint of this formulation in Henry of Ghent (1217-1293) who was the leading
Augustinian theologian after the death of Thomas Aquinas.
Henry argued that the possession of
the Divine Essence was a primary actuality and that the secondary actuality of
considering the Divine Essence was in potency to the first.[75]
It should be
clear that for God to fully consider something other than Himself would require
the element of time as He would be considering that which is external to His
own Existence. It can be argued, on the other hand, that God’s own Existence necessarily
includes all such knowledge of the permutations of created being from the
beginning to the end of time and that no derivative form of existence is needed
on His part. However, the direct
knowledge of Himself, as not Himself, would seem impossible without a
derivative mode of existence outside the Divine Essence involving time. Furthermore,
the idea that we—and all of time and history, are a creative product of the two
modalities of God’s existence is enormously clarifying—even though from God’s
point of view the two modalities are almost indistinguishably welded in the
infinite act and power of existence. Perhaps
it might be easier to understand this mind-numbing line of thinking by
asserting that there is no effort required on God’s part to exist outside of
His Divine Essence, as it is part of the Act of Trinitarian existence, from the
beginning to do so.
If it is
true that God is both One and Three then it must be true to predicate both
oneness and multiplicity equally, i.e., it is as true to call God One as it is
to call God Three. It would be inappropriate to suggest that God is somehow more
Three than He is One, and conversely, equally inappropriate to suggest that his
“oneness’ somehow trumps his personhood. It is then, in an attempt to get some
sort of intellectual traction on the nature of God, appropriate to consider God
as Trinity from our limited perspective in time and yet simultaneously to consider
God, ontologically, as One as might be imagined from the point of view of
eternity. God is clearly Three, according to Christian theology, and yet also One.
Rather than announcing the inevitability of the paradox and closing the door to
further metaphysical speculation, the notion of divine energies allows us to
approach the blinding reality of both God’s unity and personhood in such a way
as to better understand the consequences of God’s relationship to time. Eternal
or infinite time is attested to in this startlingly simple prayer.
“Glory be to the Father and to the
Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall
be.”
The Holy
Spirit, for example, appearing as tongues of flame to the apostles, is either
the uncreated Holy Spirit or some derivative effect of divine perfection
entering time or just a symbolic projection of the Holy Spirit as fire, dove or
wind. The Father speaking on Mount Tabor: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am
well-pleased,” cannot simply be an affect/effect or an appearance in time of some
sort of pre-existing script that has existed from all eternity but rather the
real deal—the uncreated presence of the Father in time. (The One is perceived
as Three in time.) Eternal and infinite time, consequently, can only enter time
in some sort of derivative format through the divine energies. Infinite time or
eternity could no more enter time in the absolute sense than could the ocean
fit into a teacup.
The Political Consequences of Belief
The
political consequences of belief are so numerous that listing them is hardly
warranted. What is important is that belief or what William Thomas, Robert K.
Merton, Karl Popper and George Soros
scrub down to as ‘reflexive truth’ is at least partly true to the extent that
people believe in such truths. We
interpret the world around us based on what we believe or don’t believe. The
astonishing range of arguments between those who believe in hot button issues
like climate change, abortion, gay marriage and even free enterprise and those
who don’t are all colored by reflexive truths—regardless of whether or not they
are true in the objective sense. The Islamic fanatics who directed airplanes at
the two towers of the World Trade Center clearly believed in what they were
doing but for the vast majority of people, their beliefs were insane. What
person in their right minds could believe that God would reward them with
seventy virgins for such bad behavior? Clearly what we believe matters but in
order for our beliefs to correctly mirror the reality of God’s universe they
must be constantly interrogated and interpreted with new information. The
failure to interrogate belief leads to intellectual stagnation. There is no
system, personal, political, religious or scientific that cannot be improved
upon in this regard.
“The principle of reflexivity was perhaps first enunciated by the
sociologist William Thomas (1923, 1928) as the Thomas theorem: that 'the situations that men define as true, become
true for them. 'Sociologist Robert
K. Merton (1948, 1949) built on the Thomas principle to define the notion of a
self-fulfilling prophecy: that once a prediction or prophecy is made, actors
may accommodate their behaviors and actions so that a statement that would have
been false becomes true or, conversely, a statement that would have been true
becomes false - as a consequence of the prediction or prophecy being made. The
prophecy has a constitutive impact on the outcome or result, changing the
outcome from what would otherwise have happened.
….Reflexivity
presents a problem for science because if a prediction can lead to changes in
the system that the prediction is made in relation to, it becomes difficult to
assess scientific hypotheses by comparing the predictions they entail with the
events that actually occur. The problem is even more difficult in the social
sciences.”[76]
Reflexivity
suggests that absolute truth cannot be known with certainty. Whether this is
true or not in the absolute sense is not an argument to pursue here. The notion
of reflexivity does raise the issue of behavioral consequences in relation to
revealed truth to a new level of consideration. The notion that God might exist
in two modalities is not without political, social and religious consequences.
Religious conservatives and the spiritually orthodox will reflexively leap to
the conclusion that such thinking leads to immanetization. This is the idea
that the eschaton[77]
(the final heaven-like stage of history) is being immanetized, in the
pejorative sense of the phrase coined by Eric Vogel: “Don’t let them immanetize
the eschaton.” This phrase more correctly refers to the denigration of Hegelian
academics who seek constantly to reduce what is divine to some sort of exclusive
expression of materiality.
Properly
understood, the eschaton is a metaphor
for a continuous relationship between Eternity and the artifact called time, i.e.,
creation is not just a seven day event;[78]
it too is an artifact. What this means, derivatively, is that the eschaton may
not have been properly understood to begin with. The elevation of the material
order to eternity is not an eschaton but rather the power of the Uncreated to
remake creation in its own image. It is, in fact, a hypostasis of the third
kind,[79]a
transformation of matter into something more than matter.[80]
The hypostatic union, the notion of Jesus being one person subsisting in two
natures, human and divine, can be extended to all of creation in that the
eternal Word is leading all of creation back to the Father.[81]
Death is not a terminus but a gateway into a new kind of union that involves
Jesus as Lord of the entire natural order.
The notion
of the eschaton is a before and after concept that does not adequately take
into account that there is no before and after in eternity.[82]
(God, for example, was not waiting to create us and is not waiting for us to
die.) Creation from our perspective looks much more like aveternity than
anything else but from God’s perspective there is no beginning. Everything that
occurs in creation is an effect produced by an Act that does not change and
that is also not limited in any way except by its own dynamic, which includes
the perfection of all things and simultaneously doesn’t include them from
before the beginning of time. This is a paradox that really cannot be clarified
unless we are able to theologically assert the dual modality of God’s Existence
in both time and eternity. All we can do is accept our conceptual limitations
in this regard and acknowledge that no such limitations apply to God.
A political system that understands
that creation is a present summons and not an archaeological event will help
set mankind on the path to a new relationship with God.
The divine
energies are exerting a constant force, so to speak, on the earth to transform
what is limited into something unlimited. Creation is an on-going process[83]
for the entire essential order. What it is to the Three Persons in One God is
entirely unknown except, perhaps, as a concatenation of endless existence,
consciousness and joy. It is, perhaps, clear that what we might visualize as Satchitananda[84]
is only so from a perspective that is outside the uncreated reality of God.
What it is in Itself is beyond comprehension.
If we think
about the divine energies as being the real power[85]
behind what we are currently calling evolution, then a great many pieces of the
picture puzzle of human existence are suddenly illuminated.
Creation is continuous,
as is Existence; it never started, it never stopped and it never will end. We
are bathed in the rose red light of an eternal temple from the time we are born
until we die. It is the immortal fire, which lights the world, and we go from
light to greater light in virtue, or from darkness to greater darkness in vice.
God made us
His children from the beginning and came back in the person of His Son to
remind us that He made us His children—not in the hokey sense of tent-revival
Protestantism or the tedious repetition of prelates who have ceased to believe
in anything else but Sunday football and cocktails—but really and truly His
children. Our likeness to God is such that what we do to each other we also do
to Him. This points to a truth so profound that we can only stand in wonder
before it. We live and have our being continuously in the glory of creation, in
the Act of Existence that has no beginning and has no end. The creative power
and love of God does not change; it has never changed. We change. It is there
as it has always been and Jesus Christ, as God and man, is right there with us.
“I will not leave you
orphans; I will come to you.
In a little while the world will no longer see me,
but you will see me, because I live and you will live.
On that day you will realize that I am in my Father
and you are in me and I in you.” –John 14/18
In a little while the world will no longer see me,
but you will see me, because I live and you will live.
On that day you will realize that I am in my Father
and you are in me and I in you.” –John 14/18
Our history
is like the childhood of gods who have a psychological disorder. Until we
realize the extent of the gift we have been given, as creators and participants
in Divine Life, we will continue to engage in a wearying cycle between fear of
the unknown and the hope that if we just repeat the right words and thoughts,
and insist that everyone else repeat the same words and thoughts, we will get
it right. There is no reward for doing the right thing except the right thing.
It is its own reward. More importantly, until we realize that we must create
with the same Spirit that created us, we will never have peace on earth.
The Imperium as a New Partnership
between God and Man
It is,
consequently, thought-provoking and refreshing to think about an institution
that might guarantee both the eternal truths of religion and the truths of the
relative order that we live in. This is the ultimate promise of the Imperium: a
political structure that really works. One that is truly “of, by and for the
people” by recognizing both the authority of God and the authority of man. The
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution acknowledge the Creator
primarily by way of assumption. A more direct approach would seem to be needed
for the present age. The issue cannot be pussy-footed around any longer.
Organized
religion, when it oversteps the bounds of common sense and voluntary
association, needs to be reined-in by civic authority as much as civic
authority needs to be informed by religious and spiritual values. How can a new
synthesis of politics and religion better serve mankind without engaging in the
morally and spiritually unprofitable separation of Church and State? How can
the energy of the antithesis between religion and politics be turned into a
creative endeavor?[86]
The Spirit may provide the key for a
creative solution to the age-old struggle between politics and religion.
“The higher judge is
the universal and absolute Spirit alone — the World-Spirit ... The relation of
one particular State to another presents, on the largest possible scale, the
most shifting play of individual passions, interests, aims, talents, virtues,
power, injustice, vice, and mere external chance. ... Out of this dialectic
rises the universal Spirit, the unlimited World-Spirit, pronouncing its judgment
— and its judgment is the highest — upon the Nations of the World's History;
for the History of the World is the World's court of justice.”[87]—Schiller
The
universal World Spirit, as conceived by Schiller, is better thought of as a
metaphor for God’s continuous and creative action on and within human history.
The Spirit would not likely reinstitute the human failure of political
institutions, so interpenetrated by religious or theological authority, as to
create a fascist neo-papal political order or an Islamic-style, authoritarian
state. Neither would He desire the other side of the coin of intolerance—the
pie-on-earth philosophy of Karl Marx’s atheistic Communism—which is no less
demanding than any religion. Communism proved itself to be a moral and social
disaster by imagining that Spirit was simply part of history, a universal
spirit, without transcendental aspects. We have had a preview of the wrong way
to go, so there is no point in repeating the old errors.
The
transcendental aspects of what Schiller called Absolute Spirit can only be
truly understood in the light of the Christian transcendentals; namely the One, the True, the Good and the
Beautiful. Without the mirror of the transcendentals, sharing with us the true
face of God, humanity descends into the darkness of Hegel’s dialectical
materialism, which is nothing more than a cosmic meat grinder for both God and
man.
The toll of
human suffering in North Korea and sub-Saharan Africa, for example, would never
be tolerated in a world infused with transcendental spiritual and moral values.
How can we take the moral and spiritual power of religion and use it to
guarantee the power and authority of the individual in such a way as to create
desirable social and political institutions that actually work? How can we make
such an institution morally, psychologically and politically attractive? How
can such an institution be made to behave, in the words of Cicero: “like a trustee, morally obliged to serve
society”?
On the one
hand it can be argued that this is what the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution of the United States are supposed to guarantee but on the other it
can be argued that a more comprehensive document and institution that embody
these same beliefs seem likely to be required, in the near future, for a world
that does not entirely share in the Christian vision. This is also why a
concept like the “divine energies” is politically relevant. How we view our
relationship with God and how that relationship is expressed politically is at
the very root of what makes laws good or evil. Hinduism, for example, would
find this notion entirely consonant with many of its theological teachings
going back thousands of years. The monotheism of Judaism and Islam, likewise,
might also find some comfort and purchase in the notion of a transcendent God
utterly beyond and yet equivalent to the local configuration of Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. In other words, metaphysics and theology might be used as a tool
for political reconciliation, instead of division.
The Founding
Fathers, from the American perspective, assumed Christian or at least Deist
values in crafting the legal documents of our nation. As Thomas Jefferson noted:
"Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law,
of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called,
are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished
him .... The moral duties which exist between individual and
individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society. Their
Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming
themselves into a nation."[88]
Our legal
system is presently re-imagining the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution, based on legal positivism, without the assumed spiritual values
of the Founding Fathers. This is a dangerous and foolish enterprise as the
ultimate result will likely be a return to the old immoralities and cruelties
of the pagan world.
The time has
come to re-imagine a world-wide Democracy based on the American vision, infused
with a pre-Christian set of moral values, lying side-by-side with Christian and
other religious values, in a new synthesis that takes the natural opposition of
divergent belief systems and converts it into positive, forward motion. It is
time to step into the human and divine authority of the Imperium. Sol Invictus![89]
The unconquered sun awaits us.
The Right to Move Forward and Change
What Is Not Working
The words of
the Declaration of Independence attest to both our divine right and obligation
to change government when it no longer serves:
“We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish
it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that
Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient
causes; and accordingly all experience [has shown] that mankind are more
disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of
abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to
reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to
throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future
security.”
The Third Imperium
may be the system of governance that will take us to the stars and into a
universe with unbounded resources for all. Modeled on the American system, with
significant modifications to avoid unnecessary polarization and factions, this
how the Third Imperium might look in outline.
The Twenty Guiding
Principles of the Third Imperium
(To be incorporated into a new World Constitution)
1. The Imperium accepts all beliefs,
including atheism, as legitimate from the point of view of election or free
choice.
2. The Imperium does not, prima facie, accept all beliefs as equal.
3. What might be considered true is
distinct from, and in opposition to, what is manifestly false. The principle of
non-contradiction is invoked: “A “cannot simultaneously be “B”.
4. The Imperium assumes that truth
exists and is not, ultimately, unknowable within the limits of human knowledge.
5. The discovery of what is “true” or real
is the essential task of mankind, as falsehood and false narratives carry
within them the seeds of vice and social disorder.
6. The Imperium takes as its guide a
system of morality that uses the concepts of virtue and vice and assumes belief
in a Supreme Being.
7. The Imperium will not be guided, in a
definitive manner, by any form of positivism, either in education or in
governance, except in legal contracts and science, or where applicable and
useful.
8. The Imperium, in the name of freedom,
guarantees the right of men and women to make wrong choices, to engage in private
vices to the extent allowed by law, but never to confuse what is allowed with
what is good.
9. The Imperium will guard truth in all
its many forms and serve the best interests of mankind through a custodial
relationship with the world and its resources.
10. The Imperium will guard the validity
of all voluntary religions but be
limited by none.
11. Any religion asserting the right to
forced conversion will be persuaded otherwise.
12. The Imperium assumes that human
population growth is not an evil and that economic development is not
incommensurate with respect for Nature.
13. Banking, finance and taxation must
serve the development of mankind.
14. A flat tax, worldwide, of two percent
will be levied. Financial parasitism and lending at interest rates above four
percent is to be discouraged.
15. The right to life is an inalienable
human right and may not be revoked except under medically justified
circumstances.
16. Violent crime and terrorism, in all
its forms, is completely unacceptable and will be suppressed using any and all
means necessary.
17. Rape and violent crime, in the first
degree, against women will be considered a crime against humanity and will be dealt
with severely.
18. The Imperium supports the notion of
Democracy and one man, one vote for men and women.
19. Marriage may only be considered valid
and legal between a man and woman. Civil unions may be permitted between
homosexuals but should not be considered normal, except by way of defect.
20. The US Declaration of Independence
and Constitution is not just a model for America, but for the world. The
Imperium must be built using these documents as its foundation.
21. The Imperium wishes all association
within the Imperium to be voluntary. The goal of the organization is to conduct
its affairs in such an honorable and impartial way that everyone will want to
participate in its affairs.
Legislative
The Eleven Houses of the Imperium
with Representatives
1. The House of Science (one
representative per scientific discipline)
2. The House of Religion (one
representative per religion)
3. The House of Elders (method of
representation to be determined)
4. The House of Leaders (method of
representation to be determined)
5. The House of Law and Justice (method
of representation to be determined)
6. The House of Defense (method of
representation to be determined)
7. The House of Education (method of
representation to be determined)
8. The House of Morality (method of
representation to be determined)
9. The House of Industrial Development
(one representative per industry)
10. The House of Family (method of
representation to be determined)
11. The House of Finance and Banking
(method of representation to be determined)
Nine Imperial Regions with Senatorial Representation
(Countries
within regions will be considered “states” with the number of Senators to be
determined by an algorithm based on population, resources and development)
1. North America
2. Mexico and Central America
3. South America
4. Europe
5. Russia
6. Africa
7. China, Mongolia and Tibet
8. Southeast and northern Asia
9. Australia and the South Pacific
Voluntary Association
Two forms of
completely voluntary association might be initially offered within the
Imperium:
1. Honorary membership whereby a country
continues with its sovereign form of government and observes the activities of
the Imperium but does not vote.
2. Imperial citizenship whereby a
country’s political institutions merge with those of the Imperium congruent
with full voting rights and protection within the Imperium.
Executive
The eleven
Houses of the Imperium and the nine regions of Senatorial representation will
each select a candidate for Regent[90]
Presidency and Vice Regent after public debates modeled on the American system.
The division of the world into only nine regions is to encourage state
alliances and federations.
A Regent, from the Roman regens "one who reigns," is
the informal or sometimes formal title given to a temporary, acting head of state in a monarchy. These Regents will be voted upon by
popular, world vote and one Regent President will be elected and may serve for
two terms of five years each and no more. The notion of “regency” is to
reinforce the notion that the office is temporary and that the Regent serves in
place of the only monarch that the Imperium recognizes: the eternal, living God.
The
administrative center for world voting will, initially, be in the United
States. The location of the capitol of the Third Imperium and its immense
physical and legal infrastructure for world governance will be decided by a
collective majority vote between Senators from the nine Imperial regions and
Representatives of the Eleven Houses. The United Nations will be disbanded as
an archaic entity whose usefulness has ended.
Judicial
32 Judges to
be selected by a computer-aided vetting process guided by the following Houses:
Elders, Law and Justice, Family, Morality and Industrial Development. Fidelity
to the new Constitution is essential. Judges will not be appointed by the
Regent although he or she may suggest names to be vetted during their term in
office. Term is for life with recalls for moral turpitude.
Addendum
One of the
ways that the Imperium might be initiated could be as an on-line game or
virtual world, like Second Life, whereby individuals from different countries
could act as “shadow” representatives. Once the size of the game becomes
sufficiently large, by encompassing enough countries and “representatives,” it
might start to have a political impact through “shadow voting” on popular
issues.
One of the
primary objections to the Imperium will, of course, be the notion that the
state would, for all practical purposes, be in bed with religion. However the first
guiding principle of the Imperium—that of the acceptance of all beliefs, and the
eighth guiding principle, the right of citizens to a libertarian range of private
vices—presumably licensed drug taking, gambling, prostitution, sodomy and other
bad habits with various rational constraints, is not the kind of bed organized
religion will find very comfortable.
Ultimately,
the notion of God as “allower,” within the context of what is reasonable, and
not the “denier” except in areas of obvious contradiction to goodness, such as
murder, theft, rape, abortion, economic exploitation, environmental degradation,
and intellectual and aesthetic non-sequiturs such as homosexual marriage, may
help shift the focus of politics to what is positive rather than to what is
negative in human life.
“Valor fares starward, fear, to the realm of death.
In living presence, mother, from the stars Heracles
speaks;
Soon shall bloody Eurystheus[91]
make you full recompense;
Over his proud head shall you in triumph ride.
But now it is good that I pass to the realm above;
Heracles once again has conquered hell.” [92]
-Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus
Virtus in astra tendit, in mortem
timor
Praesens ab astris, mater, Alcides[93] cano.
Poenas cruentus iam tibi Eurytheus dabit:
Curru superbum vecta trancendes caput.
Me iam decet subire coelestem plagam:
Inferna vici rursus Alcides loca.
Praesens ab astris, mater, Alcides[93] cano.
Poenas cruentus iam tibi Eurytheus dabit:
Curru superbum vecta trancendes caput.
Me iam decet subire coelestem plagam:
Inferna vici rursus Alcides loca.
[3] There
have been many books published on the relationship between ego and self, self
and soul, and creativity and self but for the present purpose it only has to be
noted as a wide field for further exploration. The relationship between
authority, self and creativity still has many unexplored avenues.
[5]
Ibid
[6] Ibid
[8] A
variant of Docetism, for example, might tend to trivialize Jesus’ humanity by
over-emphasizing the role of his Divinity.
[9] As
silly as it may sound, the Second Person of the Trinity cannot take a leave of
absence from the Trinity. This suggests either an eternal or a created
temporal/aveternal manifestation of the Son, as Jesus Christ. It might be said,
of course, that in the perfection of all things, within the Trinity, the
Incarnation of Jesus is included in an a-priori fashion and only by effect, in time,
without any change occurring in God. The question remains: is this true or just
a theological assertion?
[10]
This is perhaps one of the greatest insights of St. Thomas Aquinas and informs
the entirety of his theology.
[11]
This insight comes from the teachings of Abraham as spoken by Bill and Esther
Hicks.
[17] “The
original definition is from Ernst Haeckel, who defined ecology as the study of
the relationship of organisms with their environment. In the intervening
century and a half, other definitions of ecology have been proposed to reflect
growth of the discipline, to found new specialties, or to mark out disciplinary
territory.” http://www.caryinstitute.org/discover-ecology/definition-ecology
[18]
Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the Id.
W. W Norton and Company, Copyright 1960, page 14
[19]
O’Reilly, Sean How to Manage Your
D.I.C.K: Redirect Sexual Energy and Discover Your More Enlightened, Spiritually
Evolved Self; published jointly in January 2000 by The Auriga Publishing
Group and Ten Speed Press
[20]
Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the Id.
W. W Norton and Company, Copyright 1960, page 35
[21] We might say that when cathection is understood from
the perspective of joint creative action between man and God that it is a forge
of almost infinite power.
[23] As
a philosophical system
or method, Positivism denies the validity
of metaphysical speculations, and maintains that the data of sense
experience are the only object and the supreme criterion of human knowledge. In law it
means that the law is self-referential with no outside or objective natural law
to influence it.
[24]
This ecology is articulated in How to
Manage Your Destructive Impulses with Cyber-Kinetics; Sean O’Reilly, Ten
Speed Press, January 2000, http://www.amazon.com/How-Manage-Your-Dick-Spiritually/dp/1580083501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396368565&sr=8-1&keywords=how+to+manage+your+dick
[28]
Think of Natural Law as a kind of Divine or spiritual, cloud-based moral
architecture. Using the cloud, as a metaphor from computer programming and
system architecture, we can say that we all have access to this cloud-based
system of values via the operating system of our souls.
[29] Positivism
is a system of philosophical and religious doctrines elaborated
by Auguste Comte. As a philosophical system or method, Positivism
denies the validity of metaphysical speculations, and maintains that
the data of sense experience are the only object and the supreme criterion
of human knowledge; as
a religious system, it denies the existence of a personal God and
takes humanity, "the great being", as the object of
its veneration and cult
[31]
Ibid
[32] Ibid
[33]
Hugh Chisholm, The Encyclopædia Britannica: a
dictionary of arts, sciences ..., Volume 9, pg. 348, 1910
[34] A
republic is a form of government in which power resides in the people, and the
government is ruled by elected leaders run according to law (from Latin: res
publica), rather than inherited or appointed (such as through inheritance or
divine mandate). In modern times the definition of a republic is also commonly
limited to a government which excludes a monarch. Currently, 135 of the world's
206 sovereign states use the word "republic" as part of their
official names. Wikipedia
[36] The Franks, were a Germanic tribe in present-day
Belgium, France,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands and western Germany.
[37] Charlemagne,
son of Pippin 111, (c.742-814), also known as Karl and Charles the Great, was a
medieval emperor who ruled much of Western Europe from 768 to 814. In 771,
Charlemagne became king of the Franks.
[40]
Ibid
[42]
Mein Kampf
[45] http://newparadigm.schillerinstitute.com/media/andrey-fursov-the-current-world-crisis-its-social-nature-and-challenge-to-social-science/
[46]
Note that the intellectual termites in academia, who developed the politically
correct notion of B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (the Common Era),
miss the boat completely. There was nothing common about, or even now commonly
held, about the era that developed after the birth of Christ.
[47]
The Father as God Being Himself, the Son as God knowing Himself, the Spirit as
God loving Himself (formulation by Tim O’Reilly)
[48]
Here assume the Christian God; The Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
[50]
The theory is that angels’ decisions are irrevocable given the close fusion of
their essences with their existence.
[53]
Lossky, as quoted in A. N. Williams, The
Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas, Oxford University
Press, 1999, page 140
[54] The
One is not just an intellectual conception but something that can be
experienced, an experience where one goes beyond all multiplicity. Plotinus
writes, "We ought not even to say that he will see, but he
will be that which he sees, if indeed it is possible any
longer to distinguish between seer and seen, and not boldly to affirm that the
two are one." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotinus
[55]
Wilhelmson, Frederick, The Paradoxical
Structure of Existence
[56]
There is an enormous amount of theological literature on this subject but to
state that the matter has been resolved to the satisfaction of all theologians
would likely be premature.
[57] I
am indebted to Fr. Mark Byrne for clarifying this idea in a marvelous sermon he
gave in May of 2014 at the Christendom college chapel.
[58] Wilhelmson,
Frederick, The Paradoxical Structure of
Existence
[59] Grammar
: to divide (a sentence) into grammatical parts and identify the parts and their
relations to each other: to study (something) by looking at its parts ...
[60] There is a tremendous opportunity for a trained Thomistic theologian and
mathematician to articulate a new and non-linear calculus showing how the
essential order of the actus essendi works on the basis of limits which might
be mathematically described using the functions of infinite motion, infinite
speed, and infinite space delimited by time. The concept of Derivative is at the core of Calculus and modern
mathematics. The definition of the derivative can be approached in two
different ways. One is geometrical (as a slope of a curve) and the other one is
physical (as a rate of change). Time is clearly a derivative of eternity or
infinite time. We just need the math!
[61]
Georban, Kevin, Everything Forever:
Learning to See Timelessness http://everythingforever.com/einstein.htm
[62]
Ibid
[63]
Ibid
[64]
Ibid
[65]
Jason Dulle, Eternity is Not Forever:
An Argument for Theism
http://www.onenesspentecostal.com/eternityforever.htm
[66]
Ibid
[67] “No
method in philosophy has
been more unjustly condemned
than that of the Scholastics. No philosophy has been more grossly
misrepresented. And this is true not only of the
details, but also of the most essential elements
of Scholasticism. Two charges, especially, are made against the Schoolmen:
First, that they confounded philosophy with theology; and second that
they made reason subservient to authority. As a matter of fact, the
very essence of Scholasticism is, first, its clear delimitation
of the respective domains of philosophy and theology, and, second,
its advocacy of the use of reason.”
[68] Wilhelmson,
Frederick, The Paradoxical Structure of
Existence
[69]
“Who through his immense love became what we are, that He might bring us to be
even what He is Himself.” St. Irenaeus, (Adv, Hares V. Praefatio)
[70]
What Jesus means when he refers to His Father as being in heaven is, likely, a
metaphor for the derivative presence of the Father in Heaven based on the
divine energies. What we will see of the Father in Heaven, for example, in the
Beatific Vision, is likely an expression of our own contingency, in relation to
a light that produces an infinitely expanding knowledge of Existence, limited
only by our ability to process that information. The Father could be no more be
contained in Heaven than could the Holy Spirit or Christ before the
Incarnation. The Trinity is in act and that One Act does not subsist or exist
out of any location.
[71]
Gospel of Luke 18/18 and 18/19
[72]
Ibid
[73] Accidents
are the modifications that substance (the composition of matter and form) undergo,
but that do not change the kind of thing that each substance is. Accidents only
exist when they are the accidents of some substance. Examples are colors,
weight, and motion. For Aristotle there are 10 categories into which things
naturally fall. They are substance, and nine accidents: Quantity, Quality, Relation, Action, Passion,
Time, Place, Disposition (the arrangement of parts) and Rainment (whether a
thing is dressed or armed, etc.).
[74]
This can only be considered “proof” if the divinity of Christ is subscribed to.
[75] William
Owen Duba, Seeing God: Theology, Beatitude and Cognition in the Thirteenth Century,
page 250
[77]
In political theory and theology, to immanentize the eschaton means
trying to bring about the eschaton (the
final, heaven-like stage of history) in the immanent world.
It has been used by conservative critics as a pejorative reference to
certain utopian projects,
such as socialism, communism,
and transhumanism.[1] In
all these contexts it means "trying to make that which belongs to the
afterlife happen here and now (on Earth)" or "trying to create heaven
here on Earth." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanentize_the_eschaton
[78] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creation-conservation/
The notion of continuous creation is found both in St. Thomas and in the works
of various Protestant theologians. One of the issues is the distinction between
God’s holding of everything in existence in his will (the notion of
“occasionalism”) and its stand-alone, so to speak, existence in the essential
order. These arguments put the cart before the horse as existence does what it
does without the benefit of or limitations of before and after. We simply
cannot imagine existence; we can only point to what it appears to be doing as
it may be expressed in time and the essential order.
[79]
Megan L. Ferandos, The Orthodox Teaching
on God, Athens 1985. Chapter 7, pages 423-478
[80]
Sri Aurobindo referred to this in his book, The
Life Divine, as the supramental transformation
[81]
It could be further argued, by way of speculation, that it was not possible for
just the Son to Incarnate without the other two persons of the Trinity being
involved. Clearly the Spirit and the Father were involved, as Mary was told in
the Annunciation, by an angel that took the form of a man: "The Holy
Ghost shall come upon you and the power of the Most High shall overshadow
you.” (Luke 1:26-38). This
is the virtual involvement of the Trinity, in time, whether by effect from all
eternity or by way of the divine energies. It is precisely for this reason that
Mary and the Holy Spirit have been closely linked. Mary is, as was suggested by
no less than Saint Maxmillian Kolbe, an almost quasi-incarnation of the Holy
Spirit. The mission of the Son was to Incarnate. The mission of the Spirit is
to uplift Mary as co-Redemptrix of the universe. It is the Father who sustains
all of creation, including heaven and earth through the divine energies.
[83] http://www.apuritansmind.com/the-christian-walk/the-doctrine-of-continuous-creation-by-dr-c-matthew-mcmahon/
[84] (The
Hindu formulation of the Trinity: Satchitananda.
“Sat” means existence, “chit” means consciousness and “ananda” is bliss or
joy.)
[85]
This is a notion that has found expression in the works of Teilhard de Chardin
and Sri Aurobindo. The latter’s notion of the descent of a supramental
force/consciousness into matter is, essentially, a modern reworking of the
concept of divine energies.
[86] The
Father desires worshippers in truth and spirit. This is no less true of
individuals than it is of institutions.
[90] A regent, from
the Roman regens "one who reigns”, is the informal or
sometimes formal title given to a temporary, acting head of state in a monarchy.
[91] Eurystheus
is the [weak] king of Argos, who is in charge of assigning all twelve of
Heracles' labors. Heracles was actually supposed to be the king of Argos
instead of Eurystheus, but Hera interfered and caused Heracles to be born a few
hours too late. Both Eurystheus and Heracles are great-grandsons of the hero
Perseus. http://www.shmoop.com/heracles-hercules-12-labors/eurystheus.html
[93]
Alcides is the Italian for Heracles
