On the Cosmos

Reality, if one includes past, present, and future, is a narrative completeness of meaning to which we spontaneously relate ourselves. This unity, this wholeness of all meaning, may be called the cosmos. The cosmos, then, is everything that was, is, and will be. If I ask what it is that my existence is a participation in, the answer “the cosmos” is a good starting point.

How I imagine this cosmos depends on what symbolic interpretations of the whole of meaning I have received and found more or less convincing. What is “everything”? Does it include a timeless reality, whether of a divine nature (such as “God”) or consisting of an impersonal principle (such as the “Tao”)? If the cosmos does include a timeless reality, then “the real” is divided into two dimensions or aspects: on the one hand the temporal and worldly, which perishes, and on the other the timeless and permanently real. All notions of an eternal heaven, of an immortal afterlife, or of a transfiguration of the world—wherein its long history of struggle would issue into the eternal justice of a perfected reality—derive from a vision of reality as a combination of immanent and transcendent being.

Eschatological longing is the consequence of our yearning for fulfillment being directed toward a world-transcending culmination of personal and worldly history. Such is the traditional meaning of “eschatological.” There is also, however, an ersatz eschaton: the “secularized” eschaton of a world that is transformed into a perfection of social righteousness, peace, happiness, and justice while remaining, somehow, the immanent and perishable world. When the original, spiritual eschaton of the prophets has been blasted into laughability by the critiques of religion arising from materialist and scientistic views of reality, the longing for a perfected world doesn’t just disappear. The longing remains, but it is redirected along political and earthly lines.

The obvious fact that a world that is still the one we are familiar with and yet “perfect”—without vices or disorder or misery—is unrealizable doesn’t shake the power of images of secular perfection as the goal of world history; once the genie of eschatological yearning has escaped the bottle of the human spirit, it cannot be retracted. If a divinely transfigured end of history is not palatable, then a secularized transfiguration will have to do; and if neither is believable, then history—as the unrepeatable process of world and life unfolding in time—has no telos, no goal, although the image of endless gradual improvement does seem to satisfy some souls. But the embrace of that particular idea as answering to the purpose of human history doesn’t satisfy the question raised by specifically eschatological yearning, which is the longing for a conclusive fulfillment of moral hope and the desire for the darkness of human suffering to be fully redeemed.

Eschatological yearning, however, did not always exist. This is because the division of reality into an immanent and a transcendent realm of meaning is, relatively speaking, a recent accomplishment of human consciousness. (Homo sapiens appears to have evolved prior to 300,000 BCE, and Paleolithic symbols of the cosmos vastly predate written language.) It entered global cultures from experiences and insights occurring during the first millennium BCE in the cultures of ancient Israel, classical Greece, Zoroastrian Persia, the region of the Indian subcontinent, and the China of Confucius and Lao-Tse. In all human cultures before that, the unified whole of the cosmos was felt and understood in what may be called a compact, interpenetrating way, in which sacred forces and the natural world—including human societies—were perceived as interfused and patterned after each other. The divine order, in compact consciousness, is palpable in physical things, especially celestial objects and nature’s forces; human society reflects and imitates divine society; plants and animals participate in sacred being; gods can become persons and persons gods; the energies and objects of the cosmos have a certain permeability for each other; reality is a “charmed community” (Voegelin) where the shared substance of divine origins and all derivative beings is the overwhelmingly obvious fact of experience. The unity of the cosmos here has a stability consisting of the rhythms of cycles divine, celestial, earthly, and human. Fullness of meaning, narrative completeness, is present as the cosmos: reality is, as it were, self-contained. There is no exodus of reality toward an eschatological outcome beyond its present structure.

Once the fact is clarified and emphasized, though, by thinkers in various cultures that sacred or divine substance consists of a transcendent meaning (i.e., that its essence transcends both space and time), human imagination tends toward bifurcating reality into two realms or dimensions. This is, of course, a bifurcation within the oneness of reality. Reality is still one. It is still the cosmos. But the unity of reality becomes elusive once visions take hold that split reality into two realms of meaning.

One reason for this elusiveness is the enormous temptation for imagination to separate the two realms of meaning—immanent and transcendent—into two discontinuous realities, one “here” and one “out there.” This misleading spatialization seems to be almost unavoidable due to the need humans have to imagine, to visualize, anything into which we have insight. But the notion of transcendence is not about space, or place; it is not discovered in the way that new lands are found. Rather, it is revealed only within consciousness, as a Mystery made apparent by persistent human questions about ultimate origins and purposes. Its basic insight is that the perfect good and absolute ground of reality sought by human longing and seeking is not to be found among the entities of the spatiotemporal universe. That revelation does indeed transform the understanding of how the cosmos is structured, but such understanding doesn’t annul the unity of the cosmos: immanent and transcendent reality still together make up the narrative completeness of meaning in which we participate. To retain the sense of that unity, though, requires grasping that transcendence is not “out there” or “far away,” and that the origin and final orientation of one’s story is not “elsewhere” or “later,” but apprehended in questioning as a revealed (eternal) fact of Mystery—in relation to which we can strive to develop an improved openness and attunement.

Another reason that the unity of the cosmos becomes elusive after the discovery of transcendence is that, once vision splits the cosmos into two realms of meanings, transcendent being is looked for quite unsuccessfully by those who wish to confirm it in some empirical manner as if it were a “thing” like other things; with the result that it is pronounced to be illusory. A counter-vision emerges in which the only “reality” is the immanent world: the spatiotemporal universe. The whole—that is, “the universe plus its mysterious origins”—is lost from view, as the disenchanted world by itself is embraced as the fullness of being. The fact that the notions of “immanence” and “transcendence” only make conceptual sense as a linked unity—that “immanence” as a self-sufficient meaning is no more intelligible that the notion of “good” apart from the notion of “bad,” or the notion of “light” apart from the notion of “dark”—is ignored. The cosmos is replaced by “the universe,” with the result that narrative completeness is discredited. For without the human story being grounded in an ultimate story, in relation to which the dynamic evolution of the physical universe including human emergence finds a sufficient cause and an orienting purpose, the search for a deep sense to personal and historical stories fades into silence and embarrassment, amid accusations of wanting to believe in fairytales.  The situation, here, is not one of being lost in the cosmos; it is that of having lost the cosmos.

What does recovering a full sense of existence entail? At a minimum, the acceptance that there is a Mystery that constitutes a grounding “plus” of reality. That acceptance allows, as a start, the actual cosmos to come back into view.

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