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Upplands Väsby “And he saw in his dreams a ladder standing upon the earth, its top touching heaven, and angels of the Lord ascending and descending on it.”

http://reborn-babies-dolls.com/?p=55 I recently spent a good deal of time with a group of Latin speakers, and had opportunity to observe one of the metaphors most dear to Latinists, the Platonic/Neoplatonic “hierarchy of being.”  The idea is that we see in the universe a continuum of complexity, beginning with the most simple elements and rocks; then progressing to plants, which have life; then animals, which have life and breath and sensation; then to human beings, who have life and breath and sensation and reason (or consciousness); and by the power of our fantasy we can conceive, whether truly or falsely, of higher forms of being than ourselves, the various types of angels, the whole hierarchy culminating in God, who has the Utmost of Being.  The Renaissance men like Pico della Mirandola made much of this hierarchy, and also of the central position of man: and that he could by his choices perhaps shift his position somewhat, and ascend or descend on what they called the ladder of being: he could be like the angels, arms and voices of the most high, or like beasts, or, in the most stupefied state, like vegetables.  The good man, according to this logic, ascends the ladder.

Latinists often refer to this reasoning, not only because they are likely to have read Latin writers like Pico della Mirandola, but also because the same hierarchy can be expressed culturally: nobility of soul, development of consciousness, theology and epic poetry (and ancient languages) represent the higher reaches of the human portion of the hierarchy of being, and human activities relating to things like sex and food, which we have in common with animals, are lower.  Not surprisingly, you meet quite a few Latinists who are thin and childless.  This is no surprise because the natural tendency of the human mind is to see opposition: you cannot study theology and also have children: the higher cannot go with the lower; they are opposed.

This reasoning is not entirely false.  In life we cannot do all; and hence at some point the presence of one thing means the absence of something else.  Highly successful people see these oppositions and ruthlessly pursue one thing at the expense of others.  But this is worldly thinking; it is not the religious view of the world.

Worldly thinking centers on achievement within a social framework: it looks to what is useful and utilitarian and honored; it looks to means.  Religion throws these goals into a different perspective; what difference does it make, really, if you throw a fabulous party, or run a marathon, or get the promotion, sub specie aeternitatis?  The religious answer is, not much; and perhaps more is done, religiously, if your party fails, or you break your leg during the marathon, or are humiliated at work.  For God’s purposefulness is of a different sort; according to traditional theology, God did not make fruits so that man could eat them, or oil so that we could have fuel for our cars (all examples of worldly thinking posing as religion), indeed not to serve any other thing, but, as Aquinas says, ut essent – “that they might exist.”  Being is higher than purpose.

Hence religious buildings have always been the least utilitarian of all buildings – shrines and pagodas and soaring cathedrals and stupas contain innumerable unnecessary elements.  They are, in fact, frequently entirely ornament – for this purposelessness is the religious mode of thinking, that things exist for no ulterior motive but merely that they might have being.  And religion is similarly the abode of music, which we make that it might exist.  The communism of the 19th and 20th centuries represents the opposite pole of thought: there everything was purposeful, nothing was ornament, and everything served; and hence, communism was opposed to religion and the monastic life (and skeptical of music as well).  But from the religious perspective, it is more important that a man be who he is, than achieve some notable thing; the saints are miracles of being, not men with long lists of achievements.  What a man achieves is his; who he is is God’s.

Hence we see in the monastic life, that in order to achieve this fulness of self, and to alter the mode of thought, that the most talented young novices are frequently put not to work on things of lofty purpose, but are given the lowliest tasks (usually in tales it is herding pigs).  The thinking is utterly different from the hierarchical mode: the goal is not to live on a diet of Thomas Tallis, Vergil’s Georgics, and the late Beethoven string quartets.  Dante asked the souls in the lower reaches of heaven, if they didn’t wish to be a little higher?  They said no, their happiness is being who they are, and not being better than they are.  That is the best infinity for them.  The reaching for the highest things, in fact, is Luciferian: the straining for the heights produces a counter-reaction in the depths, strengthening your lowest parts, which rise in revolt and bring you back to your proper place.  Time and again in bad religion we see this striving after an exalted purity code end in hypocrisy and depravity.

What is required, all in all, is both to ascend and descend the hierarchy of being; and not merely to push upward one rung at a time, and remain there.  People who attempt the latter always fall.  If you need to hold on that tightly, you are too high.  It is better to move down and master the rungs below, before you attempt the higher ones.

For in truth the ladder is like a pyramid, whose heights always presuppose broad foundations below.  The sign of the truly higher life, is that it contains all the lower.  For indeed the whole is knitted together, and one thing is the sign or symbol of another.  I have learned to read men by how they eat, or how their eyes move, or how they hold their spines; for the lower is the field of manifestation of the higher.  This is the Incarnation, and Christian theology and ethics: again and again Christ said to judge men’s opinions of God by how they treated “the least of them,” prostitutes and beggars.  Philippo Neri is said to have tested the famed sanctity of a nun, by entering her room, throwing himself on a chair, and sticking his muddy boot at her, for her to remove; when she looked at him aghast, he knew her “sanctity” was self-inflating purity and pride.

One of the goals of spiritual development, in fact, can be to comfortably descend, knowing that you will lose nothing, that God can bring you up again; that you may course through the forest looking for food like some wild animal, or float in the warm water of a pond like a lilypad, or lay on a mountainside and let the stars shine the way they do on innumerable rocks and asteroids scattered throughout the entire universe, and in all these things you can leave, even if for just a moment, your self-serving individuality, and find yourself slipping into some other mode of thought, where you are not observing God’s creation, looking always for advantage, but being it.  At times monastic discipline can have as its goal to reduce us to the nature of a rock, and to pure being, almost without life.  You do not need to hold on so tightly to what you have acquired in your life; you know the answer but do not need to say it; you know what you deserve but are no longer crushed when you do not attain it.  This is the freedom we acquire when we pass under and know the sign of Jonah.  You will love your neighbor as yourself because you will no longer know where he begins, and you end.