THOUGHTS ON EMANATION, EVOLUTION, AND SUFFERING
This is somewhat impromptu. I didn’t think I needed to type this, but this kept nagging me so I thought I’d put school work and some other blog posts on hold for this. I assumed it was pretty obvious that the “Platonic” understanding of the nature of the “sensible world” of “becoming” can (and does) unite the theory of evolution with a “theistic” worldview. But, with the prevalence of arguments against God from evil and suffering, it seems what was obvious to me isn’t obvious to others. So, this post will be a sketch of my assumed position. Starting with Ananda Coomaraswamy, here’s a sketch of how the “Platonist” or an equivalent philosopher in other traditions, might view this “sensible world”:
The point of importance is that the Vedantic position is in perfect agreement with the Platonic, which is that things are “false” in the sense that an imitation, though it exists, is not “the real thing” of which it is an imitation; and with the Christian doctrine as formulated by St. Augustine in Conf. 7. 11 and 11.4: “I beheld these others beneath Thee, and saw that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are not…[1]
This strange concept — strange to modern senses, at least — is the root of the Hindu “Maya” or “Magic”, which is the “power” that creates the world[2]. It is understandable in a very simply way: All images are “mixtures”, in various ways, of light and darkness, Just to forestall any idea that “darkness” is a “thing” alongside light, what this means is that all light you see is not infinite light. It is a particular wavelength at a particular intensity. Infinite light admits no darkness; or rather, it is indistinguishable from darkness. Finite light requires darkness — which is simply an absence of finite light — as a backdrop to be seen. Hence this analogy shows, just like the quote, that an image neither altogether is light, nor is it altogether not light. Similarly, all sensible things are “finite”. They exist, yet do not exist. This is best seen in the fact that all our lives are also a slow death. We never really “are”, we “become”. You are simultaneously the person from five years ago and not the person from five years ago. This continuity and discontinuity undergirds the theory of evolution and its inevitably violent and death filled process. “In becoming we die and are reborn every day and night”[3], and I’d add every fleeting “moment”.
This is so because of the very nature of reality, at least as the Platonist conceives it. The “Good”, or God or Gods, has a nature of “self-giving” or “emanation”[4] in a manner of which one analogue would be the “impulse” of the Sun to shine; and as the light gets “spread out” and dimmer farther from its source, so does the “goodness” from The Good become less “intense” in its increasing “metaphysical distance”. This is not the whole story, as there is a sense in which The Good as such doesn’t radiate, but does so through something called “intellect” or “being”[5,6], in several senses of the word; and it is not a settled matter the exact way this works. There are many Platonic schools after all, but the basic concept here is agreed: A radiation of God that gives being in progressively diminished ways in a hierarchical metaphysical (NOT physical, mind you) cosmos. Such “radiation is not temporal”, it is eternal:
From what may be called the fundamentalist or literalist point of view, time in the first sense is thought of as having had a beginning and as proceeding towards an end, and so contrasted with eternity as everlasting duration without beginning or end. The absurdity of these positions is made apparent if we ask with St. Augustine, “What was God [the Eternal] doing before he made the world?” the answer being, of course, that inasmuch as time and the world presuppose each other and in terms of “creation” are “concreated”, the word “before” in such a question has no meaning whatever. Hence it is commonly argued in Christian exegesis that “in principio” does not imply a “beginning in time” but an origin in the First Principle; and from this the logical deduction follows that God [the Eternal] is creating the world now, as much as he ever was.[1]
It is therefore in agreement with the fact that evolution and the death associated with it precedes the appearance of humans on earth. But then one might ask: “What about the creation myth in Genesis?”, and this is where Coomaraswamy really shines:
Ashley Montagu, in Isis, no. 96, p.364, distinguishes to explanations of the past and present existence of living creatures of different species as (1) Gradation, assuming a special creation of immutable species, and (2) Evolution assuring the emergence of species in all their variely and mutability by the gradual operation of causes inherent in the species and their environment… The serious mythologist, however, is well aware that to interpret myth as factual history is lo mistake the genre; and that a myth can only be called ‘true’ when time and place are abstracted… What our philosophers actually understand by ‘in the beginning’ is a logical, and not a temporal priority So Meister Eckhart, ‘as I have often said, God is creating the whole world now, this instant” (Pfeiffer, p. 206); and Jacob Boehme, ‘it is an everlasting beginning’ (Myst. Parisophicum, v. 9). Similarly in the Rig Veda: for, as Professor Keith very justly remarks, “This creation cannot be regarded as a single definite act: it is regarded as ever proceeding’ (Harvard Oriental Series, 18. CXXVI). This does not mean that it is unfinished in principio and ex tempore, but that it is apprehended by ourselves as a temporal sequence and as if cause and effect could be separated from one another by sensible periods “At that time, indeed, all things took place simultaneously… but a sequence was necessarily written into the narrative because of their subsequent generation from one another” (Philo, De Opif. Mundi, 67) just as it is necessarily written into the evolutionist’s narrative; what Gradation states sub specie aeternitatis, the Myth relates sub specie aeviternitatis, and History sub specie temporis… The concepts, then, on the one hand of an eternal and ideal pattern or ‘intelligible world’, unextended in space and time and on the other of a temporal and ‘sensible world’ extended in space and time as an echo, reflection or imitation of the other, are not alternative, but correlative. Each implies the other, the uniformity of the intelligible world is in every way compatible with the multiformity of its manifestations. A real conflict of science with religion is unimaginable; the actual conflicts are always of scientists ignorant of religious philosophy with fundamentalists who maintain that the truth of their myth is historical. Neither of these can be really dangerous to anyone who is capable of thought on more than one level of reference.[7]
In short, myth is (to borrow a phrase I read on Facebook) “Metaphysics for the masses”, a simple yet profoundly dense way of putting in story truths that later philosophy (including science, which is “natural philosophy”) will explicate and rediscover. Whether it’s “the fall”, the seven days, the flood, even if they have a historical background, the deepest meaning is trans-historical. The scene in Genesis 3 plays out every day, in every sin. In every pet we own we “name” the animals as in Genesis 2. But all that is only possible because all “naming” and all “sinning” is a historical manifestation of the “original naming” and “original sin”, both of which are “aeviternal”. The former is the establishment of the intelligible world itself, where the intelligibles are their names. The latter is precisely the inevitable “dimming” of the light of the Good in its spread. There is more I could say, including about what “Eden” is, but I am barely an amateur and this is more an introduction to the wide world of theology that I don’t think most apologetics has not even scratched yet. So, for now, I leave you with this sketch, and I hope you’re intrigued enough to look for and see, for yourself, the riches of this tradition.
[1] Coomaraswamy, Ananda K, Time and Eternity (Select Books, 1989)
[2] Schuon, Frithjof, Form and Substance in the Religions
[3] Coomaraswamy, Ananda K, ‘On the One and Only Transmigrant’, Journal Of The American Oriental Society, 3 (1944), 28
[4] Beard, E. N., ‘Platonic Causality : A Primer of Metaphysical Intuitions’, 2020, 1–35 <http://nuclearaesthetics.blogspot.com/2020/09/platonic-causality-primer-1st-ed.html?m=1>
[5] Gerson, Lloyd P., Plotinus (The Arguments of the Philosophers), 1999
[6] Uzdavinys, Algis, and Jay Bregman, The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads (The Perennial Philosophy), ed. by Algis Uzdavinys (World Wisdom, 2009)
[7] Coomaraswamy, Ananda K, Coomaraswamy, Volume 2: Selected Papers: Metaphysics, 1987
