Falling Rain & Theodicy

“Into each life some rain must fall” from Longfellow’s “The Rainy Day” 

Especially when the unbelievable atrocities strike (e.g., another shooting, “civil" war, genocide) or the unbearable close-to-home happens (suicide, bullying, child cancer, road-rage fatality, domestic abuse...) or the everyday heartbreaks reach consciousness (poverty, ecological crises, enormous economic inequities, addictions, animal cruelty, leaders lying…)—at such times we may question the possibility of a loving all-powerful God. A word for this complex is theodicy. From the New World Encyclopedia: 

Theodicy is a specific branch of theology and philosophy, which attempts to solve The Problem of Evil—the problem that arises when trying to reconcile the observed existence of evil in the world with the assumption of the existence of a God who is fully good (or benevolent) and who is also all-powerful (omnipotent). A "theodicy" also refers to any attempted solution to this conundrum.

        The Catholic Encyclopedia credits the introduction of the term to Leibniz in 1710, so I suppose I should know the word better by now. The “conundrum” is certainly familiar as indicated by about 20 blogs I've written that explicitly reference the problem of evil, the book of Job, or both. Kushner’s books on bad things happening to good people have been helpful. And now, Schuon’s treatment in Eye of the Heart, while dense, offers commentary of reassurance and guidance.

“As far as theodicy is concerned, it is important to realize that the Intellect perceives Universal or Divine Good a priori, that is, it perceives this Good possibly before understanding—or wishing to understand—the nature of evil; and if the contemplative metaphysician may possibly overlook the doctrine of evil, this is precisely because he is certain in advance—and in unconditional and as it were primordial fashion—of the infinite primacy of Good, under the three aspects of ‘Pure Being,’ ‘Pure Spirit’ and ‘Pure Beatitude.’ For him, theodicy will have the secondary role of ‘putting hearts at rest,’ itmi’nan al-qulub, as the Sufis would say; for him, it could not play the role of a proof sine qua non.” [p. 42]

        Schuon adds a footnote to this: “To say ‘Being’ is to say ‘Spirit’ and ‘Beatitude’; and let us remember that ‘Beatitude’ coincides with ‘Goodness,’ ‘Beauty’ and ‘Mercy.’” He continues with guidance on the nature of certainty:

   “The credo ut intelligam of Saint Anselm means that faith is an anticipation, by our whole being and not by reason alone, of the quintessential certainty we have just spoken of; faith already shares this intellection by anticipating it, without it being always possible to decide where faith in the elementary sense of the term ends and direct knowledge begins. This is one of the meanings of the blessedness of those ‘who have not seen but yet believe’ [John 20:29]; but this saying, thanks to its sacred character, applies at all levels and therefore includes that of gnosis because in fact, to believe is not only to accept with the will and the emotions, it is also—on the very level of complete and intellective certainty—-to draw the consequences of what one knows, and therefore to know ‘as if one saw’ and with full awareness of being seen by Him whom we see not. . . . for although they obviously cannot ignore the existence of evil, those who know that God is sovereignly good, know thereby that evil can never have the last word, that it must have a cause which is compatible with Divine Goodness, even if they do not know the nature of this cause. Whatever may be our doctrinal knowledge or ignorance, the best means of grasping the metaphysical limits of evil is to vanquish it in ourselves, and this is possible only on the basis of intuition of the Divine Essence which coincides with the Infinite Good.” [pp. 42-3]

        Schuon adds another footnote to these last sentences noting Buddhist teachings about goodness. He then proceeds to discuss how the problem of evil can be held and even with the removal of “its venom.” What, when caught in this world, we consider “reality” may better be known as “accident” in order to hold to the divine, the Substance, the Reality.

“He who has the intuition of the Absolute—which does not solve the problem of evil dialectically but puts it in parentheses by removing all its venom—is ipso facto endowed with a sense of the relationship between the Substance and accidents, to the point of not being able to see the latter without also seeing the former. An accident, that is, any kind of phenomenon or being, is good to the extent that it manifests the reabsorption of the accidental into the Substance. And conversely a phenomenon is bad—in this or that respect—to the extent that it manifests the separation of the accidental from the Substance, which amounts to saying that it tends to manifest the absence of the Substance—without being able to achieve this completely, for existence bears witness to the Substance.   God and the world; the Substance and accidents; or the Essence and form. Accident—or form—manifests the Substance, or the Essence, and proclaims its glory; evil is the ransom paid for accidentality, insofar as accidentality is separative and privative, not insofar as it is participatory and communicative. Knowledge of the immanent Substance is victory over the accidents of the soul—hence over privative accidentality itself, since there is an analogy between the microcosm and the macrocosm—and it is, for that reason, the best of theodicies.” [pp. 44-45]

        Schuon footnotes this section elaborating on the “accidental” in relation to the “Substance”:

"In the relationship of the ‘accident’ to the ‘Substance,’ one can discern a kind of continuity, whereas the relationship of the ‘form’ to the ‘Essence’ is more readily conceivable as being discontinuous; the first relationship refers more particularly—but not exclusively—to the Infinite and the Feminine, whereas the second evokes the Absolute and the Masculine. According to the first relationship, there is reabsorption, and according to the second, extinction; or again, according to the first relationship the soul meets the Substance by penetrating—but without concupiscence—the accident-symbol, whereas according to the second relationship the soul renounces—but without bitterness—the accident-illusion. All this is a question of emphasis for, in fact, the notions of ‘Essence’ and ‘Substance,’ or ‘form’ and ‘accident’ are broadly interchangeable." [pp. 44-45]

         In this book, “The Question of Theodicies” is followed with “Concerning the Posthumous States.” Perhaps the mind-stopping unbelievables and the heart-breaking realities are needed in order to bring recalcitrant humans who too often go insensitive, even inhumane, to one’s knees in order to detach oneself (the “animal soul”) from the perilous attraction to the material world. Humans depend on prayer vigils as well as actions big and small to build compassion and to sustain hearts that return continuously, leaning further into the other side, the True Reality.
        A friend posted today from a poem of Sanai that includes: "Don't speak of your suffering--He is speaking/ . . . He has opened to you the Way of the Holy Ones." While rainy days here often carry associations with teardrops, sadness, and broken hearts, these are vital to the beatitudes: life, growth, and preparing the move home into the next world. 

Self Disclosure

In response to the photo (shown above) that I posted yesterday on FB, one of my friends asked if I had a new camera because the color looked a little different. About a year ago, due to some problems with the camera that I was using, I purchased a new one, the Nikon D5300, and began exploring some of the “effects” it offered. This has increasingly involved taking multiple shots of the same thing and then “playing” with the versions using the editing options in Photo in my Apple computer. Usually I take a “normal” image using one of three settings: “Auto,” “Aperture-priority,” or “landscape.” Frequently, I also take a second photo using a special “Effect” called “HDR painting.”  

        By taking photos with different settings and making visual edits, I’m continually reminded to wonder. For example, what is real? How can we invite more beauty into our daily lives? As elaborated below and as evident in my blog over the past year, such questions and explorations serve to open further visioning into the manifestations of the Divine.

        The new camera got a major workout during our trip to the Southwest in Spring 2018. The trip featured special attention to the art of Georgia O’Keeffe which likely complemented my fascination with the camera’s HDR-painting effect. Photos of the trip and its attention to Georgia O’Keeffe were fashioned into a blog and video. Subsequent blogs, such as Golden Snowflakes, have elaborated on the connections among my current photography and reading.

        Perhaps this exploration provides a career for retirement. My bookshelf overflows with riches that offer guidance. For example, open on my desk this morning is “The Eye of the Heart” by Frithjof Schuon to a passage marked on p. 4:

“The symbolic transposition of the visual act onto the intellectual plane provides a quite expressive image of identification through knowledge: in this process one must indeed see what one is, and be what one sees or knows: the object in both cases is God, with the difference that He appears as ‘concrete’ in the first case and as ‘abstract’ in the second.”

       Doesn’t this connect with the two kinds of photos I take? And then Schuon explicates beyond words I might dare to use but that encourage me further into the “world of imagination.” Schuon continues:

“But the symbolism of sight is universal and is therefore applicable also to the macrocosm and to all its degrees: the world is an indefinitely differentiated vision whose object in the final analysis is the divine Prototype of all that exists, and conversely, God is the Eye that sees the world and which, being active where the creature is passive, creates the world by His vision, this vision being act and not passivity; thus the eye becomes the metaphysical center of the world of which it is at the same time the sun and the heart. God sees not only the outward, but also—or rather with all the more reason—the inward, and it is this latter vision that is the more real one, or strictly speaking, the only real one, since it is the absolute or infinite Vision of which God is at once the Subject and the Object, the Knower and the Known. The universe is merely vision or knowledge, in whatever mode it may be realized, and its entire reality is God…”

Schuon’s footnotes on these pages amplify with similar passages from Hindu, Christian, and Native American texts (see especially footnote 14, p. 9, from a “wise man of the Ogalalla Sioux” on “the Eye of the heart, Chante Ishta… The heart is the sanctuary at the center of which is a small space where the Great Spirit (Wakan Tanka) lives, and this is the Eye of the Great Spirit by which He sees everything, and with which we see Him”).

        I’m also encouraged in venturing into an apparently never-ending path by Chittick’s introduction to “The Self-Disclosure of God.”

“One of the reasons for Ibn al-‘Arabi’s extraordinary stress on the importance of imagination is his attempt to make people aware of the disservice to understanding done by rational extraction and abstraction. Not that he does not appreciate reason. On the contrary, he considers the rational faculty one of the two eyes with which the travelers to God see where they are going, and without both eyes they will never reach their goal. However, much of the Islamic intellectual tradition—like the Christian and post-Christian—has employed reason to separate the bones from the flesh. In effect, this destroys the living body.     Too often, in the case of studying Ibn al-‘Arabi, ‘getting to the point’ is to kill. To get to the point is to bring about closure, but there is no closure, only disclosure. Ibn al-‘Arabi has no specific point to which he wants to get. He is simply flowing along with the infinitely diverse self-disclosures of God, and he is suggesting to us that we leave aside our artificialities and recognize that we are flowing along with him. There is no ‘point,’ because there is no end" (p. xi).

Perfect Fairy Tale