The First Asymmetry

Our existence, understood in its rawest form, is a cascade of asymmetries.  What we try to understand is greater than we are, or more profound than we are, or—something.  In any event, it is our conception of ourselves that we draw upon in order to try to understand our surroundings, or ourselves, or ourselves in our surroundings, or—as is my present fascination—ourselves as fading by imperceptible gradations into our surroundings.  Or maybe we simply cannot see where we leave off and where our surroundings begin.

Or maybe we cannot even see across the expanse of ourselves.  This is what I was getting at in the previous post, where I mentioned my “attempt to explore the possibilities that rise into view when we are willing to consider that we do not really know where our edges are.”  Descartes said of himself, “I think, therefore I am,” though it would have been more fundamental—though paradoxically longer—for Descartes to admit, “Something of which I am a part thinks, and I am the actualized locus of that process.”

This, then, is also the source of our first experiential asymmetry.  We cannot claim so much as a fundamental challenge from the self/other dichotomy—for in our perceivable existence, our “selves” are as outside of our conceptions as are any elements of those things we consider “others” in our environment.  Only the writhing mind-worm of our struggling knot of thoughts constitutes the self of conscious existence.

And so, we can learn things, or come to understand things, or perhaps misperceive or misapprehend things, and in each instance there is presumably alteration of the “self” of which we are partly cognizant and partly not.  This is not an interplay of symmetries, but rather of commingled interactions.  It is only by unsupported conceit that we can consider anything as “other” when any such “other” is only part of the whole of unbounded surroundings that washes against and intermittently inundates our thought processes.

And therefore, our notion of “self” as against “other” is an artificial construct if “self” is equated with consciousness and is held to be limited within the bounds of that consciousness.  No more pitiful creature exists, than the human being who considers himself or herself to be a coherent conglomeration of consciousness inhabiting a body and—if moral considerations are in view—battling against (or ratifying in detachment) emotions arising from that body.  Such a person is a godling, and is as much to be pitied as any prophet’s sardonic picture of a worthless idol.

In reality, human beings are selves who discover their own boundaries even as they probe the boundaries of their environments.  Moreover, the individual selves of human beings are as likely to frustrate their self-perceptions as they are to be frustrated by faltering and wavering understandings of their environments.  We (that is) are as unable to carry around conceptions of ourselves and our environments as we would be unable to carry our own individual weights and the weight of all Creation.  That is the only symmetry in our understandings: the realization that we are as unable to comprehend ourselves as we are to comprehend our surroundings.

And so we are led to conclude that the person who is the dispassionate driver of himself or herself (or the morally-laudable, philosophically-rational driver of the same “self” though it quiver at times with emotion) is a myth.  The “self” is a much a living thing as the body into which it imperceptibly disappears, and the thoughts and conceits of the self falter at the extremities of intellectual exertion even as the self will falter at the extremities of physical exertion.  This is the state of the human being, and a fair assessment of that state will inform our understanding of Jesus as God experiencing the personhood of a human being.  A conceptualized Jesus who rode around in the body of a first-century Levantine would be a moral grotesque—a godling play-acting in the husk of a man.

Jesus, when not exerting divinity, was the divine experiencing humanity.  When his mortal body faltered, it faltered.  When his mortal mind was burdened—and in the horrifying instance violently beset—with the human-intellect-defying question of God’s justice, he cried out, “Why have you forsaken me?”  For Jesus—reckoned to have set aside his divinity for this episode—to have understood as a man the totality of what was happening to him, would have been as unnatural for him as it would have been for him to be able to hang there and suffer as a man until the crack of doom.

Jesus’ divinity, in the agonies of his death, was not represented by his “understanding” of what was happening to him, but rather by his unrequited yet unceasing reaching-out to God—“Why?” he cried out.  Jesus could not fail to embrace God, even from the experiential distance of the Cross.  And this, in the finite scale of our own existences, is what is demanded from us as well.

We, on the other hand, prefer our neat notions of symmetry, of a nearly-equal battle between good and evil that is decided for us by the sovereign grace of a God who we can think of in terms of a familiarity, and who bought for us a neat supplanting of evil by good, thanks to Jesus.  Jesus will not allow us such a simplistic scenario, and in the light of moral scrutiny it is apparent that such a scenario would be illegitimate.  We are not in this world engaged in a self/other conflict with elements of evil, whilst permitted to anticipate an eternity with a magnified, omnipotent figuration of ourselves called God.  Rather, we are called to minister to the suffering of a larger self than us (a “self” in which we see Jesus) and to combat evil in a Creation we share with fallen creatures in which we must see our fallen selves.

The great Other in this scenario is God.  This must be so.  A God who is limited is not God.  A God who is unlimited shares nothing with us.  A God who exists in a framework of our conceptions is not God.  A God who defies all of our conceptions shares nothing with us.  If we are to confront the mystery of our relationship with God, then let it be done in this basic sense, and let it be done—as I have described before—in terms of Adam’s initial forsaking of the Great Other who created him.  It is this seemingly hopeless fracture that Jesus was sent to mend.