Reflections: On the Imperfection of Existence

From the ridiculousness of my last two posts, back to the sublime of Plato. Here, through the agency of the character Timaeus, Plato contemplates the origins of the physical universe:

Timaeus: Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable.

Monotheists in the tradition of Abraham will note that Plato's creator—the Demiurge—is good, but is not omnipotent. Everything that he constructs, using the raw materials available to him, is good only so far as good things can be made of imperfect material. He is making beautiful, but essentially imperfect, copies, modeled on the Ideas of the Intellect or Mind Most High. So our world is neither created ex nihilo, nor is there any need of a Fall to explain the presence in our world of that which is less-than-good.

As for the situation in which we find ourselves relative to existence, Iris Murdoch notes in her essay “The Fire and the Sun” that:

Order is obviously more beautiful and good than disorder… Our participation in [this joy] must, however, be seen as modest. The contact with changeless truth brought about through insight into pure living mind can only for incarnate beings be limited and occasional, and we are likely to see more of necessary causes than of divine causes. The truth which we can grasp is something quiet, small in extent (Philebus, 52 C), and to be found only in the lived real moment of direct apprehension out of which the indirectness of mimetic art and writing and perhaps language and discursive thought itself always tends to remove us. Those who want to be saved should look at the stars and talk philosophy, not write or go to the theater.

Necessary causes that bind us to the material, to contingency—expressed by Simone Weil as that “gravity” of downward motion which impedes the upward-tending desire for grace—keeps us trapped, and moving horizontally, in a linear motion across time; time which is the created ape of eternity. Circular motion around an axis being infinitely more perfect than progress from point A to point B, the best we can hope for is to keep to the straight and narrow path on our journey—avoiding as best we can the many temptations gesturing from the shadows beneath the glittering lights of the broad way to perdition.

The conservative, then, as symbolized by circular motion, should be more perfect than the progressive. What is the cause of conservatism’s failure to partake of a larger portion of the grace offered by the beauty and the goodness of existence? Why does conservatism fail so badly in the service of love?

Religion: Bhakti Über Alles

We can conclude our considerations of Schweig’s “Textual Illuminations” on his translation of the Bhagavad Gîtâ, by examining two more paragraphs in the section discussing the yoga of the Gîtâ. I will then relate this back to our earlier discussing of an alternative interpretation of the myth of Eden and the Fall of Man. The first paragraph:

“When the soul is bound to this world, it is subject to the powerful conditioning of the ‘qualities’ of nature. Furthermore, when a soul is reborn, the life of that soul is largely determined by the positive and negative effects arising from the activities of one’s previous births. The worldview of the Gîtâ, however, blends conceptions of free will with this deterministic view. Free will is a necessary ingredient in love; that love cannot be coerced or controlled is axiomatic for the Gîtâ. This subtle but critical theme shows that souls are given the power of choice, without which there is no possibility of love.” (p. 250)

Since the gunas, the above mentioned ‘qualities of nature,’ include negative effects on the soul, it is clear that a human soul possessing free will, and interacting with the material world, with all of its distractions and enticements, would not be able to love, and thus be reunited with the Divinity, unless that soul possessed the knowledge of good and evil—the faculty of discernment—allowing for the free choice of Love, i.e., the Good, to be made. In the following paragraph, Schweig writes:

“The love call of God, found within his sacred teachings, awakens free will, enabling the soul either to accept the cycle of endless birth and rebirth that binds the soul to this world, or to choose a path leading to the eternal world that frees the soul from the cycle of suffering. This mortal world, the Gîtâ implies, exists so that souls can exercise choice, without which there is no possibility of love.” (p. 250)

Therefore, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Eden must be seen as a necessary instrument in the Grand Plan of creation. And what follows from this is that the Serpent—that most “subtle” creature in the Garden—is a messenger of wisdom, rather than a purveyor of sin and death. Schweig’s paragraph concludes:

“The implication is that there can be no true love in the divine world without an alternate world. Thus this world, ultimately designed to facilitate love, is brought into being by the divinity to give souls the freedom to love.” (p. 250)

“Alternate world”: Anyone for dualism? This mutual love of God for his creatures and his creature for Him, is known in Sanskrit as “bhakti.” In order for bhakti to happen, what is called the “Fall” in the Old Testament must happen. Without its occurrence, Adam and Eve would possess no more spiritual gravitas than a pair of Disney bunnies. This leads us directly onto patently heretical, Gnostic ground. If God, as presented in Genesis, has forbidden the knowledge of good and evil, then this God may be the Creator of the material universe, but he is clearly not the God of Love. We must see this God as the Demiurge, not as the “all pervading, imperishable Brahman” of the Gîtâ; not as the supreme One of the Platonists, nor as the utterly transcendent, infinitely removed God of Simone Weil; and, most controversially, not as the all-loving Abba proclaimed by Jesus Christ.