To Behold the Face of God
Assume Christianity.
Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. — Ezekiel 1:1 KJV
Diodorus Siculus relates the story of a broken and scattered god, which story, like that of the scattered body of Osiris, or the fall of Babel, invokes a universal feeling of recognition in the human heart that there is something infinite and holy that has been either lost or denied to us.
The Blessed Argentine Epistolary Borges conjures this visage of “The True Portrait of the Holy Face of God” and yearns to behold “My Lord, Jesus Christ, true God” and the fashion of his semblance, while lamenting that even if we were to find the Paradise of encounter with this single true face of God in the labyrinths of our own dreams, we would not even know it tomorrow.
He boldly postulates that perhaps the face lurks in every mirror, or was willfully obliterated by the Christ himself so that God could be all of us.
Wherefore it is said by The Beloved Apostle that “No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”
Blood Covenant
The Church therefore, functions as the means by which The Eucharist, through the Mystery of Transubstantiatio (or in Greek Orthodoxy the metousiosis) of the ‘accidents’ or ‘elements’ of the bread and wine may have their essence changed into that of the body and blood of the Christ, and be received by the communicants, so that Holy Communion between God and Man, through Jesus Christ, and only Jesus Christ, may be possible.
As Simon Peter writes, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”
Raphael’s fresco The Disputation Over the Most Holy Sacrament in the Vatican depicts a scene with The Holy Trinity and the heavenly host presiding over the Eucharist while those below on Earth debate the controversial sacrament.
In Remembrance of Me
We have gained the mediator sought for so desperately by Job, but the agony of this gift is that to use a mediator requires that one be made acutely aware of the reality of their separation from God.
Seeing only shadows, as The Least of The Apostles writes in his Epistle to the Hebrews, but never beholding with waking eyes the true and complete face of God.
For which reason men through time have sought to recover this lost knowledge of the true and perfect image of God denied to them since Adam’s fall.
The Light Bearer
Therefore some of the more blasphemously heretical sects of occult and esoteric Christian and Luciferian Gnosticism have portrayed Christ not as a savior and mediator, but as a tyrannical selfish obstructionist.
Those who take this view often find themselves seduced by the temptation to seek unnatural means through which to circumvent the mediation of Christ and gain audience with God the Father directly.
Total Cinema
This radical doctrine, and its many bastard theurgetical practices, have taken many forms, but none of such great import as Andre Bazin’s ancient theoretical notion of Total Cinema.
By the which we mean to say the deliberate and permanent dissolution of the natural barrier dividing Life and Art, and by extension, Artist and God, which would eliminate the need for Christ and Holy Communion through the Church and bring the Artist into oneness with God.
Art instead of Eucharist.
Bread into Body. Wine into Blood. Lead into Gold. Art into Life. Man into God.
Ironically, the invocation of precepts taken from Thomas Mann may be used to show that when seeking any point of origin, like the face of God, the origin is “unfathomable”.
Total Cinema, the seventh and perfect Art of God, is no different.
But the beginning and end of all literature is myth, and literature and theatre predate film, so it may be that all forms of art are part of an infinite cycle of metaphor and myth.
Unsurprisingly, and yet paradoxically, it may be said that The Quixote marks the origin of the modern novel.
The Quixote
The authorship of Cervantes being a trivial matter of circumstance, the true power of The Quixote comes from a subtle understanding of The Author’s partial use of magik.
The Author of The Quixote was inspired by the figure of a golden idol of Mohammed (the reproduction of whose likeness is wisely forbidden) which was cast in secret by craftsmen skilled in metallurgy who had been blinded before creating the figure and then killed in sacrifice immediately afterwards.
The figure was stolen by Montalban and, after many centuries, was rediscovered somewhere in the vast geographies of Spain, “in the valley of the Moon, where the time wasted by dreams is contained.”
After seeing this golden figure, Cervantes has wrote The Quixote.
The Quixote is a work of realism, however not in the sense that it excludes the supernatural in an attempt to show that which is marvelous in the everyday, as one may find in Conrad, James, and other nineteenth century realists, but rather to show that which is real through the juxtaposition of a prosaic and an imaginary world between which Don Quixote moves freely.
The Quixote mingles the subjective and the objective, the natural and the supernatural, by blending the realities of the reader and the book, by including characters from Cervantes’ real life who had read his other books, and by insisting that the windmills be made into knights.
Lead into Gold. Wine into Blood. Windmills into Men.
In the second part of The Quixote, the characters read the first part, and thereby the protagonists are transubstantiated into the readers themselves.
Art into Life. Life into Art. Virtual reality.
Total Cinema.
The Doomed Prince
In the same manner, we see God’s Shakespeare include within his Hamlet a staged tragedy almost identical to the tragedy of Hamlet “wherein I’ll [Hamlet] catch the conscience of the King,” or to use the proper metaphor, by creating Total Cinema wherein I and God are One, I shall glimpse the true face of God in myself.
As in Kaufman’s Adaptation, a movie about a screenwriter writing the screenplay for the movie he is in.
Total Cinema then becomes equal to The Magnum Opus or The Great Work of Alchemy.
The Philosopher’s Stone.
Infinite Jest.
The Artist however is not alone in seeking this corrupt apotheosis, but is joined in his dangerous masturbation by The Philosopher.
Philosophy and The Infinite
Josiah Royce in his first volume The World and The Individual formulated the thought experiment of the creation of a perfect and complete map of England on a section of soil in England.
This map would therefore contain a map of the map itself, and so on into infinity.
Plato records Zeno and his nine surviving paradoxes including the infamous infinite stack of tortoises which things are the first reductio ad absurdum or “reduction to absurdity”.
By now I hope you will see that this effort at creating Total Cinema to circumvent Christ leads to an infinite loop of circular and endlessly deferred meaning.
Absurdity.
So let us approach it from a different perspective.
The View From The East
In many Eastern traditions, the initiate is not taught that the image of God is lost, but rather that each individual is part of the image itself, and therefore must simply be reminded of their oneness with all things, and with God.
If the initiate can clear the mirror of their mind, free themselves from all illusions, they may then behold the true and perfect face of the attribute-less primordial Buddha, which is to say their own true self, which is to say the perfect face of God.
The Dharma, The Tao, and others acknowledge no separation from God by sin, but a forgetfulness of oneness brought about by Life which is seen as “a festival of disruption.”
But since there is no way to stop Life without causing death, this leads to another struggle with the infinite the only escape from which is to take control of Life, which then leads back to The Myth of Total Cinema.
The Eastern metaphors link hands with those of the West and only complicate and reinforce the inscrutable web of circular infinity that God has imprisoned us in.
Therefore, we must fail to reject Caryle’s observation of 1833 that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.
The Quixote.
Post Modernist Philosophy
Derrida in his lecture at Hopkins points out that the logocentrism of Western Philosophy is flawed in that it misunderstands the linguistic lessons of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Derrida seeks to deconstruct all meaning through observing the eternal deference of meaning inherent to all language and logical systems.
In other words, because all ideas expressed in language or logic are only able to be understood in reference to other parts of the same arbitrary system, they invariably create a large network of circular reference that is self defeating and provably meaningless.
Therefore, even Caryle’s observation, although impossible to reject, is useless.
There is nothing in these metaphor’s.
The infinite is meaningless because it cannot be comprehended by the finite.
Whereof we understand the agnostic atheist theology of Berman, Kubrick, Allen, Coen, Anderson, and many others.
The Universe as God’s Prison
If by reading this you have become bored, frustrated, confused, or exasperated then you have done well and ought to be greatly commended.
This is the trap of human agnostic consciousness designed by God to torment those who would seek to circumvent his Christ.
We are locked inside the dimensional trap of the space-time universe by God who exists outside of it.
So trying to see him, or commune with him, becomes an absurd exercise in maddening futility.
As addressed by Homer in The Odyssey and by Kubrick in his 2001 Odyssey.
We are without the sensory or intellectual faculties with which to comprehend God, and therefore remain trapped in space-time and myth.
The only escape is to accept his Christ, or wriggle out of God’s trap.
So let us try again.
The Fearful Sphere
Six centuries before the Christian era, the rhapsodist Xenophanes of Colophon wearied of the Homeric verses he traveled city to city reciting, and in an attack on the poets and their myths who attributed anthropomorphic traits to the gods, offered to the Greeks a single God, a god who was an eternal sphere.
As history progressed, these gods Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figments of poetic fiction, but one of them, Hermes Trismegistus, dictated a number of books (42 according to Clement of Alexandria).
It is said that in these books are written all things.
Reading God’s Private Library
This divine library, called the Corpus Hermeticum, has tragically been fragmented and dispersed by those seeking its knowledge much like the scattered god of Diodorus Siculus.
Near the end of the 12th century, the French theologian Insulis discovered the following lines written in a fragment of parchment attributed to this library and to Hermes Trismegistus himself.
“God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
Which seems to play on the words of Solomon unto whom God appeared, “The heavens and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee.”
The Heavens Declare The Glory of God
Years later, the idea from Insulis’ parchment would produce the heliocentric model in Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres).
This revelation was a liberation for Giordano Bruno who said in Cena de la Cenari that the world is the infinite effect of an infinite cause, and that divinity is close by, “for it is within us even more than we ourselves are within ourselves.”
The Labyrinth and The Abyss
In time, this liberation turned to a feeling of being lost.
Because if the future and the past are infinite, and if all beings are equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, then it is impossible for a man to know when or where he is or the size of his own countenance, let alone that of God.
Added to this came the notion that, as the gods of the poets had been demoted by the fearful sphere of the eternal and single God, so too had man been continually declining in all attributes since Adam’s sin.
Robert South said “An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.”
In other words, we were losing more of ourselves, more of God, over time.
Pascal
“What is Man? A Nothing. Compared to The Infinite.” — Pascal
And so by the time of Pascal, the idea that Xenophanes had begun as a liberation from myth had become a labyrinth and an abyss.
Pascal abhorred the universe and sought to adore God, but all he encountered was the universe.
He likened this experience to that of a castaway on a desert island.
Pascal expressed his feelings by saying that “Nature is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
And so it may be possible that all of the history of philosophy and theology may be understood as a series of slightly different attempts to articulate the same metaphors in an effort to sum up the futile efforts of human beings to see the true, infinite, and perfect face of God which simultaneously and paradoxically exists within us, but beyond the bounds of the prison of our universe and the limits of our own comprehension.
Visions of God
The final cruelty of all of this is of course that, at times, God has revealed himself to prophets.
Moses saw part of God and gave Israel the law so that they might know a semblance of his likeness.
After his encounters with God, Solomon counted all things in the Earth as mere vanities and lost his soul in an effort to escape our prison and gain power and contact with the divine.
The blessed prophet Ezekiel beheld visions of God and struggled in vain to describe what he beheld.
Saying he had seen “a wheel within a wheel.”
Like a map within a map, or a play within a play, or a book within a book, etc. etc. on and on into deranged infinity.
Transcendentalists
Emerson and the American Transcendentalists suggested true being as that of an eye that is nothing, but sees all, and is part and particle with God.
Which may be a delusion self idealization created by consciousness to reconcile its own existence with itself as it is prevalent in nearly all philosophy and theology in the East and West.
The Transcendentalist Style in Film of Bresson, Ozu, Dreyer, Schrader, and The Apostate Apostle of Cinema, seeks to force the audience into an encounter with “The Wholly Other” of the spiritual and infinite realm outside of the universe, and then to make sense of it in their own way.
Locke shows that we rely on observation and reflection to create theories, but Descartes and the skeptics show we can’t trust our senses.
This leaves us with no way to reliably accept or reject any hypothesis taken up.
So finally one must take it on faith to believe whatever one wants about the enigma of God and existence.
The end result is Kierkegaard and Abraham, and maybe just take communion and be done with it.
Submit to God’s plan of salvation by Grace through Faith in Christ manifested by Acts.
Maybe that’s all.
Or maybe not.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe everything.
I don’t know.
Augustine
It may also be that Augustine’s Beatific Vision applies to this infinity paradox of the face of God.
That is to say that if this is the best approximation of the image of God that man is capable of conceiving, then by contemplation and internationalization it may be possible for a brief moment to see the darkness above the light and peek over the fence so to speak at the face of God.
But for God’s sake and your own don’t look too long or you will go irretrievably insane.
Authorship
Originality is not only unfathomable, but also an illusion.
Xenophanes of Colophon denied teaching that God was an eternal sphere and named several others who taught the same thing.
The writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, Thoth, and many other ancient Gods are likely not exclusively their own work, but the product of many authors.
The Holy Bible was written by many people, many of whom are unknown, or attributed.
The story of Christ is the sum of many witnesses not one author.
Moses did not write the law himself.
Plato’s work is a collection of the ideas from many thinkers, not one author.
Cervantes claimed to have bought the manuscript of The Quixote from an Arabian Mystic and had it translated at great expense.
Shakespeare's plays were likely not written entirely by him but are the products of many authors.
And I, John, have not written almost anything on this page.
God alone is all things.
When we reach the end of our space-time prison we will leave it and, God willing, join God.
The history of the universe is that of many, and of one, of one, and of many.
And it is God’s.
Everything and Nothing
“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” — Heidegger
One final myth, not of an age, but for all time.
Upon finding himself in the presence of God, Shakespeare told Him, “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.”
The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dreams are you, who like myself are many and no one.”
Shakespeare, after speaking with God, sold his theater.
And has written no more plays in this universe since that day.
He died April 23, 1616.
Vanquished by reality, Don Quixote died in his native village in 1614.
He was survived but a short time by Miguel de Cervantes.
Ezekiel last experienced an encounter with God in April, 570 BC.
His time of death has not been recorded.
Behold, The Face of God
here lies bob dylan
killed by a discarded Oedipus
who turned
around
to investigate a ghost
& discovered that
the ghost too
was more than one person
-bob dylan
Now it came to pass in the twenty-fifth year, in the second month, in the nineteenth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Hudson, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.
Silence is now playing in theaters.
May the grace of our lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
Amen.
