Thinking about Nothing

Exploratory Sketches (§22-28)

(§1-7 ; §8-14; §15-21)

§22. The Triadic Levels

We can envision three ontological levels: the Abyss, the Torah, and the Gospel. The Abyss is nothingness, whence we humans are called forth and to which we might always return; we certainly are born free—free to degenerate away from the Creation. The Torah (or the Law) serves to establish a floor against the draw of the Abyss by delivering parameters that are to govern what we can and cannot do. To live under the Torah is surely a massive improvement over the swirl of the Abyss, the amoral entropic churn that rises only barely above the level of primordial slime. But the Torah cannot deliver spiritual freedom, the ascension of man into his proper destiny. Such a feat can be achieved only by the Gospel, which is above the Torah. The Abyss has no ground, nowhere we can stand and feel the requisite gravity to build; the Torah fixes that problem and establishes the pavement. But only the Gospel provides the divine lift that we need to take wing into the skies.

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§23. To Fulfill The Law

The Gospel can’t abolish the Torah insofar as the Torah is effective on its own terms of keeping the Abyss at bay. The Torah forbids many crimes, for instance, and it’s not as though the Gospel is intent on “liberating” us to now go ahead and commit them—for that would only be a regress into the Abyss, not a genuine spiritual advance. Law, however, is always a blunt instrument; it is broad and imprecise, susceptible to morphing into counterproductive specter that impedes life instead of protecting it. The Torah always points beyond itself, toward a flourishing that it cannot itself command or bring to full fruition. But it does establish some necessary conditions of security and mutual trust, a type of social contract by any other name. There could not be Gospel without Law, in the same sense that there could be no flight for an airplane without a runway; we need the basics in place before we can get to the advanced stuff. And so it is that Jesus comes not to abolish the Torah, but to fulfill it: to preserve its original function of sealing off the Abyss, and to manifest its final end of making incarnate the Kingdom of Heaven.

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§24. The Pharisaic Turn

The Torah only turns into a problem when it wishes to become sufficient unto itself, in which case it begins to block not only what is beneath it but also what is above it: not only the Abyss, but also the Gospel. It is then unable to distinguish up from down, but instead views only as a threat anything whatsoever that is not itself. This is the Law turned pharisaic and cancerous, the same as it was when it was leveraged to murder Our Lord. When the Torah goes spectral like this, its partisans would necessarily view the Gospel as their nemesis. It is certainly a messy matter, to challenge the Law in the name of the Law—not least because opportunists who hate the Torah as such may pursue false friendship with those who only wish to restore it to its proper, open course. It is not clear whether such tensions can be helped. Probably, creative chaos will always be needful when the Law goes wrong, given that Torah itself is the filter that is meant to discern between what is Gospel and what Abyss. If the Law is asleep at the wheel, then chaos becomes inevitable, as its counterpart levels are pushed into direct duel. The time falls out of joint, as those living it can tell.

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§25. Utopian Delusions

Politics is the quintessential activity of the Torah: the development and implementation of laws. But the Torah is only meant to keep the Abyss in check, with violence if required—and since we’re talking about the pull of nothingness, it often is required. There are things in this world that only understand physical force, and such a response is entirely in order when dealing with such spawn of the Abyss. But a fundamental category error thus dwells at the root of any and all utopian efforts to leverage politics to make incarnate the Kingdom of Heaven, which can only arrive via the works of the Gospel’s spiritual freedom. Torah is meant to avert the worst things, and to generate the space that would be needed for the best to become manifest; just as violence can protect the space for freedom, negatively establishing a territory into which the Abyss cannot encroach. But the Torah can’t make a harmonious and hi-fi society emerge, just as charity and love don’t answer to the point of a gun; such matters have their being above and outside of the sphere of the Law. Let us have done, then, with the tiresome delusion that Heaven can be coerced into showing up.

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§26. About Honorifics

If there is an Abyss outside of God, and if man’s freedom is uncreated and from that no-where, then we may need to reconsider what some of the traditional epithets for Him might mean: omnipotent and omniscient and so on. We already know that God doesn’t have the power to force us to love Him, just as He doesn’t know the future in a way that would make a joke of our capacity to freely determine it; these “omni” words are thus already not quite what they seem. Such terms are likely honorifics applied by us to God, meant to be taken seriously but not literally. Insofar as God is a person and not some speculative metaphysical abstraction, we can infer that there are contours to His qualities, which give Him shape as the person who He is. He can’t do things that contradict His Logos and His love; and in the metacosmos, who knows?—He may still well be ever growing, such that He is not at any upper limit of Himself. And the Abyss may likewise be falling into ever lower states of degradation: motion, motion, all in motion.

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§27. Logical Limits

We like to toss around words such as “Being” and “Nothing,” while clearly being unable to imagine any actual referents to these concepts. An operational definition is possible, however. We know what presence and specter are: the area of the circle of reality, versus the no-man’s land entirely outside of the circle. And we can cultivate the noetic discernment needed to tell which way is which. Now, we can posit that an absolute maximum of presence could be called Being, with that point represented by the center of the circle. And an absolute max of specter would then likewise be Nothing, as far outside of the circle as it is possible to get. Being and Nothing are thus logical limits, and they establish the parameters of the arena within which we find ourselves: there is no greater degree of presence than Being, and none of specter than Nothing. These concepts define vectors that we may travel. But that isn’t to say that either Being or Nothing are in themselves “real” per se. It is better to simply think of where we are and where we’d like to go, as opposed to insisting on important-sounding words that we couldn’t begin to comprehend.

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§28. Phenomenological Dualism

Dualism is surely real from a phenomenological standpoint: we experience the pull of God and the pull of the Nothing, as two distinct forces acting upon us. A lot of normie theology suggests that evil doesn’t properly exist; that it is only the absence of the good. But we may respond with a casual so what. Whether evil is technically a something or a no-thing is of the most total irrelevance, pragmatically considered, since in either case, we find ourselves confronted with a force that must be responded to as such. It is probable that the force is only a vacuum—the absence of an entity rather than the presence of one—but that question is also purely academic and shouldn’t really occur to those among us who are too busy resisting the force to ponder the intricacies of its most appropriate semantic appellations. In any event, we may suppose that this force is uncreated, outside of God, locked in some aeons-old conflict with Him. Most speculative metaphysical systems posit a monism where all ends in the One, but we see at least Two—and it is always good to trust our own eyes.