INFINITY OF INFINITIES: THE FIVE PRESENCES
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But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You. How much less this temple which I have built!
1 Kings 8:27
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
Hamlet
“There are an infinite number of infinities of different sizes”
Dennis Wildfogel, elaborating on Cantor’s theorem
This series of posts will explore the fascinating and enormous (and I mean enormous) cosmology of Frithjof Schuon. He pretty much lays it out in Form and Substance in the religions as the “Five presences”, a small name for something that, when contemplated, opens a whole world of possibilities for one’s imagination of many things, including fiction, science, religion, and concerning religion in particular, eschatology. He didn’t invent this, he is simply elaborating on a Sufi doctrine, although he admits there are various forms of the idea in other sects and religions. What I see however, is something that touches my love for total beauty and truth, of wholes rather than parts, and it makes me wish we believed in even the smaller versions of this cosmology today. It is richer than anything Discovery channel or contemporary cosmology gives me, my love for them notwithstanding.
The “Five Presences” themselves are five “levels” of reality, the higher more “real” than the lower. What determines they being more or less “real” corresponds to their “proximity” to God, who (in a way that I’ll explain in the sequel) is Himself the first two levels. The main stumbling block to understanding how reality can have “levels” and how something can be “more real” is the very "materialist" way we see things. As a physicist in training, it may be weird for me to say this, but “reality” does not automatically mean that which is “physical” in the crudest sense or that which can always be reduced to mathematical formulas and theorems. I cannot get into a long discussion about that here, but I want you to simply understand the ancient conception of things (that Schuon holds) this way: God is the source of reality. Indeed, He, as “Cause”, is more “real” than his “effect”. Whatever is “closer” to Him, that is, whatever “intermediate cause” he uses, is more “real” than the proceeding “effect”. This is not strictly temporal, but logical. The “Cause” (like the Angel in charge of Clouds) and “Effect” (Clouds themselves) don’t follow in time (they can be “simultaneous” from our point of view), but they follow nonetheless, and the cause is always greater than the effect.
What this means is that compared to a higher level, a lower level is an “illusion”. By illusion, I don’t mean non-existent, I mean its existence is not absolute. For example, a source of light is more real than its reflection, but the reflection is real nonetheless, it just isn’t “as real” as the object it reflects, it is an image, a simulacrum, not the object it simulates. It is an “illusion”. Analogically, men of old held that the “sensible”, that is, that which we perceive with our mortal senses (i.e, all “corporeal” and “physical” things) are shadows of spiritual things, and will pass away in due time. “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2). This should be common knowledge, St. Paul said it, so did Plato, and many others. Only God is supremely real, and even those more permanent spiritual worlds will pass away before Him.
The levels themselves are arranged in descending order as:
Beyond Being, or Self, Father, Absolute, Essence, Atma
Being, or Son (Logos), Spirit, Divine Person, Relative Absolute, Energies, Maya
The Celestial World(s), or “Heaven(s)”, the world of “light”, “spirits”,
The “Subtle” World, the world of “fire”, “soul”
The Material World, of “bodies”, the realm of “quantity”
Despite the neatness of these categories, it should be remembered that God Himself transcends these categories, and that this way of seeing things is relational, i.e. in relation to us. God in Himself is “the Essence”, unknowable and ineffable, who encompasses all these levels without confusing Godself with them. This “Hidden Essence” that is itself the relationship between God as “Beyond Being” and “Being”, and is the very “container” of all things, is often called “Sophia”, the “Divine Womb”. Schuon notes that:
“A Sufi—probably Ibn Arabi—has written that the divine Name “She” (Hiya), not in use but nevertheless possible, is greater than the Name “He” (Huwa); this refers to the Indetermination or Infinitude, both virginal and maternal, of the Self or “Essence” (Dhāt).” [1]
The “stability” of the absolute unknowable God as “He” in “Beyond Being”, is complemented by the Infinitude of “She”, even transcending “He” in this aspect even if “He” transcends “She” in another aspect. This balance shows the complicated yet ultimately “simple” nature of the ineffable God.
From this, I can now say that, just as God encompasses all things, so does the higher “contain” the lower. For as Heaven is “bigger” than earth, and in fact “contains” it (even when we are talking about the physical universe, where the universe is vast compared to us), so God “contains” all things. There are two complementary ways to imagine these levels:
You could imagine God “Beyond being” as the centre of concentric circles, with the circle closest to the centre representing God as “Being”, and so on. This is useful for imagining God as “absolute”, the centre around which things turn, from whom they “emerge” and to whom they will ultimately return, for all is relative to Him (a good image of this would be the Heliocentric model of the Solar System, ignoring the fact that orbits are ellipses and not perfect circles).
OR
You could imagine the opposite, the outermost circle represents God “Beyond being”. And the next circle is “being”. The circle could be infinitely wide, but you can’t imagine that anyway. This is useful for imagining God as “Infinite”, the “container” of all things “in whom we move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), with “Earth”, that is, the material universe (yes, including galaxies and such) at the centre, representing the hardness and “solidity” of matter with respect to heavenly “ether”, represented by the “less solid” celestial spheres (represented by the circle) This image is far more popular and often known through the vilification of “Geocentrism”. Let me say here that no matter the scientific theory (and then again, General Relativity doesn’t favour any particular frame of reference, even if Heliocentrism is more “practical”), the spiritual image it gives is enough for it to be given respect by the religious, and it would do us good to study it, understanding that its value is not in technological usefulness.
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If you use the first model, it is important to note that, the farther away from the centre (God), the “harder” and more fragmented and "darker" the realm. The second model shows that the “farther” from God, the smaller the world. Indeed the higher “contains” the lower. Put together, we can infer that although the lower world is smaller, it is more “numerous”. The closer to God, the more integrated and larger the “worlds” are, “larger” here not indicating “space”, since that is a feature of our material reality.. It is “larger” in that is “contains” and interpenetrates the lower levels, “larger” here is analogical, not an indication of space but of actualized possibility, what is possible for the heavens is mostly impossible for the material realm, remember the “models” we are using represent realities which our minds can scarcely imagine. Far away from Him, and they fragment into smaller pieces. Just like there are more asteroids in the asteroid belt than there are planets in the solar system, yet any one planet is larger than all the asteroids there put together, so also are there more hells than heavens, but just one heaven dwarfs all the hells. Yes I said heavens, and not just in the sense of “seven heavens”, but in the sense of an infinite number of them, each one larger than infinite hells. That will become clearer later, but I have hinted at it in the last quote at the beginning of this post (the video where it was said you can check out here. It explains how there different types of "infinity" have different "sizes". I don't know if Schuon knew of Cantor's theorem, but his words certainly parallel the theorem itself in his language of infinity). For now, think on this, it is a bit much for an introduction, but the subsequent part will elaborate more in the different levels in greater depth. But remember, no matter what is said here, God is infinitely bigger and better.
Schuon, F. Logic and Transcendence.