This is Hell

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 20 July 2015.

The Massacre of the Innocents by Giotto, Lower Church, Assisi

My question is how is Arthur White's predicament/plight like everyone else's in the electronic age? Except, perhaps, for those who have found some "narrow way."

I started this thought process contemplating our revelation of God through the Catholic faith. In my weakness, I tend to conceive of this in a Plotinian way:

• God the Father as The One, the Indivisible Source of All Being
• Then his only-begotten Son, what Plotinus called the "Intellectual Principle," the Word Made Flesh, consubstantial with the Father
• Then the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, Plotinus' "Soul," allowing us to cry out Abba Father in a spirit of adoption. It also begins the final age, a process of reintegration so to speak, first evidenced by the mass of humanity, scattered since Babel, hearing the apostles speaking in their own tongue.
• Then us, the Church, the Body of Christ. But also at this point becoming like little gods (Jn 10:34), radiating out, being fertile and multiplying, creating, procreating, proliferating. The ecstasy of this moment is captured by an exuberance of metaphors. Yes, we are the Body of Christ, but we are also the Bride of Christ, and this is the nuptial moment.
• Then "when everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be All in All" (1 Cor 15:28).

Just like that. The whole story of the universe. Of course, this is one of those times bullet points just don't do it justice. But make it all cyclical and interpenetrating and mysterious and we should be in the neighborhood.

I think Arthur White examines the opposite path. Of course, there is no opposite to God, no dualistic universe. But if you'll pardon the semantic necessity, it goes something like this:

• Instead of God as the only source of our being, "God is dead"
• Instead of the Incarnation, the massacre of the innocents
• Instead of an infilling of the Holy Spirit, an emptying of minds, hearts, wombs, homes, public squares; our only principle is the steadfast maintenance of emptiness, a cacophony of inarticulate voices echoes in that emptiness
• Instead of fertility, spousal and conjugal imagery, we are left with the image of the clone, parthenogenesis, a recapitulation of my empty projects within my empty self, echoing that emptiness to all the world. A close second is the image of the cannibal--I'll leave you to work out the anti-Eucharistic meanings. Repost, retweet, embed!
• And instead of All-in-All, this all collapses back to the empty individual self, who, once all has been cannibalized and cloned, becomes next-to-nothing. This is Hell.

Without God as our source of being, we return back to the nothingness from which we were created (again, pardon the semantic difficulty of having to attach words like "from" to nothingness). But that which has been created cannot be fully destroyed. Thus, as C.S. Lewis somewhere explains, we exist in a state of next-to-nothingness.

I recognize it may not be entirely clear how all this relates to the project. I may try to explain what I'm thinking in a more practical sense in a later email.