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Questions for Reflection:
1. Does it make sense to you to see the fall and evolution as spiritually linked? If both the fall and evolution are part of the same wheel of cosmic drama, what implication does this have for the integration of science and spirituality?
2. Review the myth of the serpent found on pages 239-240. Is this myth helpful in explaining the world we live in? How so? Does this myth give you a deeper sense of the meaning of the Christian mystery? Why or why not?
3. What are some examples, from your life, of “open” and “closed” circles? Try to avoid the temptation of seeing open circles as automatically better than closed circles, or of closed circles as necessarily “evil” or “inferior” because of their association with the serpent. Perhaps the serpent can be appreciated simply as a metaphor for materiality and embodiment. Especially consider if you know of any closed circles that ought to be opened (or vice versa).
4. Consider the “Law of the Cross” as described on page 259 (see also the Spiritual Exercise for the Wheel of Fortune). Do you agree with this idea that apparent paradoxes, tensions or seeming contradictions can be reconciled in the cross? Can you think of ways in which you have found the resolution of contraries in the cross (and not just the examples that our author uses, i.e. courage and discipline, knowledge and contemplation). What are some other ways that the Law of Cross helps us to find union, reunion, reconciliation, or some other type of coming-together?
There’s a fundamental contrast in Letter X between the idea of the universe as a closed circle, symbolized as a snake swallowing its own tail, and the idea that the universe is open, that it admits freedom and creativity, that the energy of the Logos, of Christ, entering from outside breaks the cycle of cause and effect.
Here’s how the study guide for this letter characterizes these over-arching views of reality:
“[I]f the universe is ultimately a closed circle, then everything we experience is, in a similar way, ultimately absurd. For this reason, the author’s insight that Christ represents the opening up of the circle of the universe is profoundly inspiring.”
Writers like Don Cupitt (of England’s Sea of Faith group) talk about our world as being “outsideless” so that we need to give up the Platonic notion of a perfect, changeless, transcendent reality beyond the contingency, temporality, and finiteness that characterize this realm, because the Enlightenment and post-modern thought have made any other way of thinking increasingly difficult. It seems to me that our author would put Cupitt’s views squarely in the snake-eating-its-tail camp, along with the views of Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), Nietzsche, and the rest of the transcendent reality skeptics and deniers.
I’m really struggling with this: toward better understanding our author’s claims and the reasons he advances to support them, but also as a matter of my own faith journey. I find that for me at least, Cupitt is correct: believing in transcendent realities is becoming more and more difficult. He’s not at all troubled by the idea of giving them up, and maybe I shouldn’t be either. But I’m sure our author would have the same evaluation of Cupitt’s views that he has of Nietzsche’s: “How monstrous!”
I’d be grateful for anything anyone can offer toward clarifying what’s at issue here and helping to resolve it, although I realize that’s a lot to ask!
Isn’t this the crux of discernment: weighing the merits and liabilities of two or more alternatives? There’s always the third option, that somehow both Tomberg and Cupitt are right, that somehow Platonism and postmodern skepticism can paradoxically coexist. Don’t ask me how that would work: to paraphrase Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy, I’m a contemplative, not a philosopher!
I think for me postmodernism ironically gives me the freedom to accept Platonism/Neo-platonism (and therefore the cosmology of our dear author) as imaginative possibilities. If there’s no ultimate overarching narrative anyway, why couldn’t the Platonists be just as accurate or believable in their worldview as the anti-transcendentalists? I think the key here is approaching any/all worldviews as hypotheses that we are free to investigate and even believe in, but we are never forced to accept (as if they are dogmatically true). In the freedom to weigh all worldviews as *possible truths* I can weigh the merits of any one worldview by how reasonable it is, how morally/ethically liberating it is, and so forth. I don’t have to have all the answers. After all — if we let the Buddhists chime in — it’s all impermanent anyway! Surely worldviews are just as impermanent as anything else, and in that impermanence, we are free to wonder, to consider, to discern.
Don’t know if this is helpful — or merely so much sophistry! But these thoughts at least can help you to understand how I am able to hold paradoxical views lightly.
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