The Sky Daddy and Anthropomorphism

 Two famous accusations, with an underlying tone of mockery indicative of bad faith, are often made by New Atheists.  One can be easily dealt with - that there is as much reason to believe we are created by a personal, triune God as by a “spaghetti monster”.  The suggestion of arbitrariness is perhaps somewhat credible against Protestantism and even Kierkegaard’s anguished leap of faith, notwithstanding the disrespectful and deeply blasphemous tone.  In terms of traditional Christianity, which, like the Neoplatonists, sees a transcendental order to the cosmos, this somewhat childish accusation does not hold.  Indeed, the advocates of scientism, such as Russell, have more explaining to do, when they claim the cosmos, finely tuned as it is, is simply there with no cause or reason.

A second accusation against Christianity that can also be made by Neoplatonists and Buddhists, who do believe in the transcendental, but not a personal Creator, is that the Christian God is a consequence of anthropomorphism.  As the disrespectful New Atheists put it, we have a need for a Sky Daddy.  Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras would not disagree, referring to the erotic yearning for God.  The Neoplatonist sees the One as impersonal, the Buddhists acknowledge the transcendental meaning of reality, without accepting the personal nature of the Creator.  

In a recent debate on Youtube, between esteemed cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and Christians Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Hall, Vervaeke builds on this perspective, arguing there might be a latent crypto-egotism in Christianity.  For all its claims about kenosis, the person survives and has a relationship with God as a Father and Lord.  This means it is not true self emptying and instead preserves my existence and anthropomorphises God.  Vervaeke is of course not as crude or reductive in his arguments as someone like Dawkins.  He recognises love and care participate in transcendental reality, but rejects that it works both ways.  Contrary to Jordan Hall’s reciprocal openness at a divine level, Vervaeke sees the care of God for us and our personal existence at an eternal level as unnecessary and unjustified.  Further it contradicts agape as the highest form of love - we have a secret vested interest in our faith - selfishly we want to live forever and be loved by the highest reality.

The discussion can be found here:  https://youtu.be/Vp_08T0Ucik?si=_IH0L9q5pnun-uaK

In this we see the great divide between Eastern religions and the Greek philosophy of Neoplatonism on the one side, where the person is completely absorbed to the point of benign annihilation, versus the Christian belief that the personal is central to reality.  God created the cosmos as a personal god and Man as a person is the imago dei.

This really is all about Being.  We can see how this sanctity of humanity has degenerated in the secular West into liberal individualism - a true cult of egotism.  There is no intention here to make a case for that perspective.  Nonetheless, there is a different and fundamental point - yes the Fathers recognised God is both Being and non being.  God is above existence so it is in a sense true to say God does not exist, not in an ontological sense.  Indeed God is something more like Beyng as opposed to Being, to use Heideggerian terminology.  God is non-dual, above the divisions into Intellect and Soul of the Neoplatonists.

On a more fundamental level then, the personal exists.  God is Three Persons, in part because he overcomes duality and also is One as an aporia.  

It is somewhat arrogant to attempt to compete with the intellectual ability of John Vervaeke.  All that can be said in unsophisticated and laymen’s terms is why this simply does not ring true for me.  Yes God is in a sense above all superlatives.  Included there is love, goodness, truth and beauty.  But all of these participate in God.  The personal is the highest level of existence.  In human beings it is the person that makes us more than a mere sum of our parts (and more than the passions that lead to the consumer individual of liberalism too).

Yannaras points to our encounter of the personal energy of other humans as indicative of the Supreme Personal of God.  What is fundamental to understanding any of this is the separation of energy and essence.

What happens in most Eastern faiths is in one way or another, the human person is dissolved in the divine essence.  True Christianity does not accept this, because Creator and Creature are of different natures on a fundamental level in an unbridgeable way.  Nonetheless, participation in the divine energy is not only possible, but the purpose of our existence.  This was always the orthodox perspective, but was most clearly articulated in the arguments St Gregory Palamas made in defence of the monks of Athos and their practice of hesychasm - specifically the Jesus Prayer.

It is surely the case that love is only possible if personal identity is retained and through the existence of energy.  Energy is what is personal.  Yannaras refers to the capacity we have to recognise the distinctiveness of Mozart’s music or Van Gogh’s art - neither are the substance of the person, but both are expressions of the unique energy.  We find God, we find faith, not through propositional arguments, but in recognising the divine energy expressed through creation, which is not in itself God.  Relationships are in the realm of energy not essence.  This is how Orthodox Chrsitian philosophy saves the human person from annihilation.  It is also how love is real.

In our personal human relationships, true love is the intermingling of energy without dissolving the other person - they retain their fundamental existence, their being.  This is why the so-called “sky daddy” is so central, so important and worth defending as that which Christianity is about,  The relationship is all made possible through the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos (the principle, the wisdom, the Logos, the Sophia) as man - God in the flesh in time and space.  We can thereby overcome the barrier - our fallen nature.

Is this crypto egotism?  Not so, it is rather what makes love possible.  It is in recognising the eternal sanctity, through eternal being of the person, we can truly self empty through love.  The Three Persons of the One Godhead and the personhood of the Imago Dei are why there is being and how we can achieve kenosis, because persons are real and eternal and can be loved. 

Liberal Totalitarianism

 Liberalism  defines itself as anti-totalitarian, it is the ideology of freedom.  There are certain qualifications here.  Freedom is the freedom of the individual and the nature of his freedom is freedom from oppression rather than freedom to possess or have something.  The word “liberal” in the United States is associated with the Left, whereas in Australia or the United Kingdom tends to refer to classical liberalism of Locke and J S Mill, which in the Anglo Saxon countries at least is associated with conservatism.  In any event the argument here is that all ideologies have a tendency towards totalitarianism and that liberalism is not immune from this tendency.

It must be acknowledged that the thinker in the vanguard of this is Alexander Dugin, whose Fourth Political theory is predicated on the claim that all three ideologies, Fascism, Marxism and Liberalism have a totalitarian logic to them.  We have seen recent manifestations of totalitarian moves in Anglo Saxon countries.  Canada froze the bank accounts of protesters against Covid measures that would affect the livelihood of their trucking businesses.  Australia was notorious for its Covid lockdown measures.  The United Kingdom is imprisoning people for expressing controversial opinions on social media in the wake of a brutal murder of innocent little girls.

The classical liberal would argue that these moves were contrary to the principles of liberalism, but that does not change the fact that liberalism is by definition reductive.  It does as someone like Robert Nozick argues have certain transcendental principles that come from a mysterious origin - property rights have a real as opposed to nominal existence for example.  He derives this from Locke who was a nominalist on every aspect of reality bar rights of property.  This aberration is not usually explained.

We have noted above the distinction between classical liberals and those liberals of the Left.  This is only a relevant nuance from within liberalism.  All forms of liberalism reject the old hierarchies of value as oppressive and preventing individual self expression.  What seems a fundamental difference to liberals, as they argue amongst themselves, in terms of negative and positive liberty is merely a fine detail from other perspectives.  The key point is, apart from the anomaly of property rights having real existence for classical liberals, real metaphysics have no claim upon our ethical behaviour.  We are not participating in a higher or collective meaning, but pleasing ourselves alone.  The one standard that unites liberalism of Right and Left is the individual is the measure of all things - that might be to withhold his possessions from others or it might be to impose obligations upon others for my own right to certain things - such as restricting freedom of speech so as not to be harmed by offensive comments.  The person concerned with imposing upon others is still concerned about themselves as an individual and not about  higher Good.

So liberalism sees any higher Good as oppressive and the enemy of individual liberty.  This is because the liberal atomises the person as an individual neither linked to any vertical or horizontal good.  He is disconnected from God and his neighbour.  In this sense that other Enlightenment ideology, Marxism, has an unexpected family resemblance to liberalism.  Marx too rejects any higher principle other than the materialist physical laws of science whereby yes at first collective action throws off the oppression based on the false consciousness of higher values, but this is to attain eventually pure individual liberty unencumbered by the demands of tradition, society or religion.  Marx was at heart a liberal too.

This liberalism is rooted in nominalism and the idea of each individual being his own isolated monarch.  In other words the cosmos follows the law of power not of any higher value such as Dante’s motivating love.  Hobbes was as much of a liberal as Locke.

The liberals reduce all to a mere contract, relying on a fictitious or imaginary state of nature that provides the basis for a contractual form of government.  This is the ideology of the money-driven mercantile class.  Any sense of a higher meaning to our world is rejected and the powers and thrones and dominions of the heavens are ignored.  Instead we exist in an arbitrary world where the only solid fact is supposedly the individual.  Here the person is imagined as the modern buffered as opposed to the porous self of the ancient and Mediaeval worlds.  This distinction is set out by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. In the enchanted pre-modern world people were participating in higher meaning and vulnerable to infiltration by infernal forces.  Human life was a microcosm of the cosmos, holding the cosmos together as the imago dei, not an arbitrary random individual disconnected from everything and everyone else.

How though does this contractual state, protecting us from the arbitrary state of nature, lead to totalitarianism?  Well Hobbes is the first to provide an answer.  For the sake of freedom from the misery and state of war that the state of nature leads to, we surrender to an authoritarian state.  Underlying every liberal perspective is the secret belief that the State is there to protect individual rights and we have therefore contracted away absolute freedom.

Whether it be to protect property rights or protect my rights to self determine my gender (given only the individual perspective counts - realism is rejected), the State is there to enforce those rights.

We can see two trends in the modern West - the growth of private property rights in every aspect of life that can be enforced and also the enforcement of the individual’s right to determine reality in restrictions to freedom of speech.  Without any sense of a higher reality above the individual there is no limit to enforcement potentially if individual rights are violated.

The negative liberty of private property rights comes to have power of legal enforcement over public areas.  Monopolies occur and public goods become private without individual rights being violated, but we find ourselves trapped in a world of enforcement.  There is no hope of everyone having the private property envisaged by Chesterton of three acres and a cow - most of us end up as tenants subject to private enforcement companies.  ON the other hand, in the world of woke liberalism, the statement of a true fact can lead to legal sanctions through cancel culture, or the destruction of one’s career.  The State has the right to take children who want to change their gender from concerned parents on the basis of the sovereignty of the individual.

What happens with liberalism, as with all revolutionary movements, is that to secure liberation the ends justify the means and higher principles can be violated.  It is no accident that the liberal ideology of utilitarianism, where individual pleasure, hedonism, is the measure, all principles can be violated to achieve the end in sight - there is no deontological limit to Bentham’s consequentialism.  In the end we have the Panopticon of prisoners living according to their pleasure under absolute surveillance.  Here the individual can be sated but observed, while higher ideas of human dignity are ignored.

It is the case that J S Mill with his rule utilitarianism tried to lever in a sense of value not really compatible with pure utilitarianism and that Nozick tried to synthesise Locke and Kant with a deontological emphasis on the metaphysical realism of individual freedoms, particularly private property rights.  Both fall into the same problem that they have to rely on a level of metaphysical realism to reintroduce value and once that step is made, how does one avoid the scaling up to the Good, the True and the Beautiful?  How does one avoid the case that there are real things of value, there is a real meaning over and above mere individual desires?  Once we distinguish between pushpin and poetry or assert there is a metaphysical reality to property rights we are acknowledging the legitimacy of philosophical realism and a hierarchy of value.  The individual is no longer the measure, there is instead a transcendent level over and above the individual.

The liberals were seeking a limit to arbitrary power, but their whole metaphysics are arbitrary and rooted in a radical scepticism that in the end can find no argument against oppression in the name of abstract and arbitrary individual rights.

The Inauthenticity of the Left - applying Heidegger’s existentialism to the modern progressive Left of the West.

Those who subscribe to the Left regard themselves as having special insights, a particular progressive morality and a deep authenticity.  Here we will show how this outlook is really a narcissistic temptation in the tradition of Babel and a manifestation of what the Greeks called hubris.

The building of Babel in the Book of Genesis was a Hebrew tale of what the Greeks would call hubris. It was a belief Man could build the perfect globalist city without God. In that sense it was a Promethean project - that which the ancients understood was doomed to failure.

When we come into this world, thrown in Heideggerian terms, we find a world around us and at a deeper level we encounter in its hiddenness, Being itself.  This is a very Heideggerian account, but that is because we need to highlight the inauthentic nature of Left wing politics and Left wing movements.

The Left is motivated by a sense of outrage, indeed it is moved by what it sees as the call of justice.  In this it is imposing a veil of meaning over the world that clouds our capacity to uncover Being.  We are determining how the world should be and not respecting what it actually is, how it presents itself to us.

The world is full of mystery, tragedy, beauty, goodness, evil.  The desire to impose a new world order is a wilful denial of what is there to be discovered and uncovered.  There is an impatience and arrogance in declaring this theoretical alternative is how the world should be, in accordance with my imagination of a system.  

Again the same mistake is being made in the very idea of justice.  Of course the world we discover is full of cruelty and injustice, but a systematic replacement through drastic and violent revolution or even progressive reforms is a particular idea of justice that is inauthentic.  We see now the rejection of the world we uncover in the promotion of denial of gender, but that is only the latest and most absurd manifestation of a journey into denial of formal categories or reality as preceding us.  Justice itself pre-exists us in a formal sense and it is manifested in prescriptive rights and religious dogma prior to our theories.  Here English common law is a useful illustration, based as it is upon precedent.  Nonetheless even Justinian’s codification looked to precedent and the divine - that which is before us.

History shows how alienating and perverse supposedly enlightened ideologies turn out to be when imposed.  The theory quickly dehumanises and destroys the very human aspects of culture.  Family, friendship, loyalty, respect are usually undermined in favour of an abstract theory.  The Communist guest in a bourgeois household finds he likes these people, but then must remind himself for the sake of the revolution they must be liquidated.  He understand the family is a capitalistic imposition of domination, but finds himself loving his own parents and children.  Either he allows his own family to be the exception or he crushes the feelings of human sentiment for the sake of progress.  He falls in love with one woman, but continues to advocate for free love and the abolition of marriage.

This is the inauthenticity of the Left - the progressive putting his own theories above his personal interactions, his encounter with the real world.  And for the sake of progress he works to destroy all that is most sacred to human beings.  And all for his own theory of a just system.

He renounces the call of his own family, his own fatherland, his own gods of his home.  In all this he imagines himself somehow superior to the reactionary mass of men, not realising he himself is becoming ever more alienated from the authenticity of Being and becoming less and less human, while loving Man only in the abstract.

Political shibboleths become the idle talk of the they-self, which exists in the inauthenticity of Being that precludes real life.  As long as the correct opinions are held one is not at risk of becoming real - which is a terrifying prospect.

We see this trait not only in the murderous Marxists of the Twentieth Century, but in the progressive Fabianism of Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, a man who cannot relate to his own people, his own customs and traditions - instead in a move of deep authenticity he places a veil over the human life he is born into with all its particularities and calls to affection.  The veil is a system, a system that produces justice in the abstract, but miserable resentment and conflict in reality.  Ideology, particularly from the Left is as great an imposition clouding our vision and breaking our connection to the authentic world as any scientism or codified and rationalist theory of religion. The only authentic politics is the defence of that which makes us human - the politics of reaction.