INFINITY OF INFINITIES: MATTER AND MEANING
Welcome to the last post in the series. We have looked at the overview of the five presences, the duality of God, the immutable heaven, and the mutable sky. Now we look at fragmentary matter, where God meets man in his squalor and elevates him to kingship.
V
THE MATERIAL WORLD
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”
Genesis 1:2
“Matter, as was pointed out before, is nothing else but the extreme limit or precipitation-point in the process of manifestation, at least for our world; consequently, it is the 'lowest' thing to be found within that reality that concerns us”
Frithjof Schuon [1]
We have come to the ground floor (pun intended) of the cosmos. This is where we are most familiar with. The main prejudice of today is that this sliver of reality is actually all there is, often unconsciously ignoring the far larger worlds in our minds, and the even more “expansive” world of spirit that animates even our souls. Matter is the “hardest”, yet most “unreal”, part of existence. It is fragmentary and transitory, and yet, for some reason, we think it is most real. Bodies die, plants wither and stars explode, revealing themselves as wholes that are never fully whole, they must divide into parts and disappear entirely with the universe in heat death. Yet, despite this, with even the emptiness one feels when all sees is undead matter, we still think it is most real.
It’s quite hard to see beyond this, I’m sure many who read this do not subconsciously think of spirit as “substantial” at all, not to talk of it being more “substantial” than so called “physicality”. But, I’d like you to try. It is important to note that what we do not see is “pure matter”. Pure matter, if we take matter to be simply pure divisibility, with no order or structure, is simply nothingness. Now, materials can tend to pure matter, in that they tend to nothingness, that is, they break into ever smaller pieces, and that’s what we like to do these days, in our particle colliders and nuclear bombs, but they can never reach pure nothingness, only smaller and smaller particles, which may or may not have a limit (don’t ask me, ask a particle physicist). This tendency of matter to breakdown into “watery”, that is, chaotic, nothingness, is seen in the personification of the watery chaos of creation that was called Tiamat in the Ancient Near East. This personification was also called "Leviathan" or “Rahab” in the Bible, who God (the author of the forms), subdues and destroys when he makes creation (that is, by giving Chaos form):
“Thou hast broken Rahab in pieces, as one that is slain; thou hast scattered thine enemies with thy strong arm”
Psalm 89:10
Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon?
Isaiah 51:9
We see in Genesis that he does this by creating light, which symbolizes “meaning”, “logos”, like in the word “enlightenment”. “Let there be light” is the slaying of nothingness and calling forth creation from its defeated body (funny enough, there was an analogous occurrence in the evolution of the universe, look up “epoch of recombination”). On a side note, Nuclear weapons represent the opposite of this creation, as it is the destruction of “matter with form”, to attempt to reduce it to the nothingness of prime matter. Its unimaginable destructive potential can itself be called a “return of Tiamat”, the bringer of the “deluge of watery (or fiery) chaos”.
Returning to the subject of the corporeal objects we see in our normal lives, what we see, when we look around (Trees, clouds, your bed), is matter with form, that is, in the words of Wolfgang Smith, “Corporeality”, and not “Physicality” [2]. We see whole objects, not collections of sub-atomic particles. No one has seen a sub-atomic particle before, they are not visible. Even when we see wholes made of parts which are themselves large wholes, like a solar system, we still think of it as "one thing", before we divide it. When we do go from parts to a whole, the whole is always, in language at least (and consequently in reality if language is to have meaning) more than its parts, and can be "separated" or "abstracted" out, as seen in the fact that we have words for wholes in the first place, that do not need to imply its parts. Atoms themselves are wholes, people may see atoms, and indeed there are images of atoms (not with the naked eye of course, but with powerful microscopes), but we do not see a collection of protons, neutrons and electrons, we see atoms, and they are the smallest things we can actually see (with assistance). Discard the artist renditions of its structure, they are aids, but not actual images taken with a camera or seen with your eyes, these structures are inferred when atoms are split apart or invaded by smaller particles, but never seen.
This may be confusing, but it’s simple really, just think back to when last you looked at a table and thought “I’m going to put my plate on this organized collection of atoms which are organized collections of sub-atomic particles”. That’s right, most of you have never thought that, and I’m sure most people never will think that. We see wholes first, then we can start thinking of the parts. This is really important, because it tells a whole lot about our consciousness, and how it relates to the world.
If consciousness was inconsequential, and the meanings we assign to the world are not “meaningful”, that is, they don’t correspond, or say anything true about the world and are just convenient fictions in order to organize our experiences, then nothing really exists. The table you saw is not a table, you just call it that, and you don’t know what it is, you are not even seeing it right, you are seeing nothing but a phantom that you call “table”, when all that is there is meaningless matter, which we can’t imagine or see, because if it is meaningless, there is no description, image, or vision of it, it is literally “nothing”, hence why “pure matter” = nothingness (the earth before creation was “formless and void”).
But this acceptance of the “reality” of meaningless matter is only true if you ignore the contradiction here, which is that if you know that there is no meaning to our words beyond the words themselves, then that knowledge corresponds to a meaning beyond words. For example, if you know that there is no ultimate meaning to the word “table”, then one of the meanings of the object we called “table” is that it is not a table. That there is no true or real meaning is itself a meaning. Such problems and contradictions, which make it impossible to even do science (even sub-atomic particles mean something), leads one to reject the idea that “all is matter”, rather, it is more true that “all is meaning”, or the equivalent, “all is logos”, for the ability to know something whole, that is, its meaning, is to know its logos (or its “rationale”), which, on further interrogation, is what we mean by “cause” in the classical sense, like in cosmological arguments, where God is the “uncaused cause”, meaning, the ultimate or universal meaning and rationale, or organizing principle, of all things.
This is what I mean when I say we see “matter with form”, form meaning that which makes matter intelligible and real, or on the other hand, meaning or logos which communicates itself through matter. Matter is only ever transitory, and means nothing in itself, and it is nothing in itself, it is only given form to communicate meaning. This participation of matter in form happens exactly in the medium of “Soul”, the “animic”, which if you remember the last post, is the realm of change, where matter is made to participate in the heavenly “essence”, “form”, or “meaning”. This covers natural and not just man-made objects. Stones mean something, so does the Sun. If consciousness didn’t exist, there is no difference between the universe and nothingness, because nothing perceives it. It becomes meaningless. It isn’t even a spectacle, since spectacles imply someone to witness it. It is just, nothing.
An objection would be that it is shown that the universe predates us, but that implies that consciousness is something that emerged with humanity, which would make the objection valid only if consciousness could arise from matter itself, which isn’t possible. Anyone who probes the workings of their consciousness (not the brain, mind you), will realize its absolute priority to even matter. This is the reason for the virtual unanimity among mystics in every established religion on the subject of consciousness. The universe predates mortal men because God, who is the fullness of Consciousness itself, calls it into being from the pure nothingness of the “materia prima” into the transitional “hylomorphic” objects of the material universe (if we use Aristotelian language), which themselves are simply passing manifestations of meaning beyond matter. For example, the stars manifest the gods and angels (the personifications of the transcendent order of the cosmos) in their “ruling” of worlds (Solar Systems) as seen in Genesis when they are called to rule Day (The Sun) and Night (Moon and Stars).
Humans themselves are small “incarnations” of that unoriginate consciousness, and only in that sense do they predate the universe, not in time, but in eternity. We are the small scale manifestation of the God who calls forth creation from nothingness. We call otherwise meaningless matter “stone”, participating in giving it meaning, and therefore form. We go further in our Arts, and in our Science, and ultimately in Religion, which in Christianity’s case, is where the meaning of simple bread is that it is the Body of Divine Logos, the highest meaning possible, and through it that meaning is given to us, and we await the day this meaning will reveal itself fully to us, in that “everlasting day” (Revelation 22:5) where we will be “the meaning of God”.
Schuon, F., & Nasr, S. H. (2005). The Essential Frithjof Schuon. In The library of perennial philosophy. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0513/2005014071.html
Smith, W. (n.d.). WISDOM OF ANCIENT COSMOLOGY Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition.