Jottings from December, 2023. Consume with caution. I am not a specialist in Asian philosophy.
1) I am always already my True Self. I do not need to become my True Self. I need only to realize (come to have insight into) this timeless fact. Not make it real, but become aware of its antecedent reality. There is no theosis if this means to become God-like. The mundus sensibilis is not a vale of soul-making. I am ‘already’ God, or rather, the eternal Atman. I may need time to achieve the realization but not to become who I ‘already’ am. To achieve the realization is to become enlightened. To become enlightened is to achieve salvation. Salvation is thus noetic and achievable in the here and now in the midst of the samsaric crapstorm, or mayic world-dream. You don’t have to wait for salvation or release. It is not in the future at the end of history. Salvation is noetic or gnostic, not eschatological.
2) Time is merely phenomenal and thus metaphysically illusory as belonging to maya. It seems to follow that the realization (the coming to have insight into the timeless fact of one’s identity with the eternal Atman) is itself illusory. Is this a problem? A bug or a feature?
3) Advaitins don’t explain the world; they explain it away. They say about the physical world what some (Daniel Dennett, for example) say about consciousness, namely, that it is an illusion. It would not be inaccurate to say of Dennett & Co. that they do not explain consciousness (despite the title of his eponymous book); they explain it away. Makes no sense to me, but that is what they maintain.
Christian metaphysics, by contrast, explains the world. You cannot explain what does not exist or is not the case. (Think about it: would it make sense to demand an evolutionary, or any, explanation of why unicorns have only one horn?) The physical world (cosmos) exists. Given this fact, and given that it exists contingently, it is natural in Christian and not just Christian metaphtsics to ask why it exists.
4) Advaita Vedantists will try to assimilate Christianity to their view, but the latter in all of its mainstream versions (Orthodox, Roman, and Protestant) remains unassimilably distinct from Vedantism. On the former, there is no plurality of real individual egos. Such a plurality is metaphysically illusory, as are the members of the plurality. There is only one Self, the eternal Atman, which is numerically the same in all of us. At metaphysical bottom, I am the eternal Atman and so are you. At bottom, then, you and I are one. Not so on the Christian view according to which individual egos or selves, although created by God, and thus ontologically dependent on God, are nonetheless real and remain separate from each other and from God after their creation.
Roughly, then, for the Advaitin there is only one Self whereas for the Christian there are many selves with God being a supereminent self among the many selves.
5) There is a tension, however, in the Christian position. It leads to what I call the ultimate paradox of divine creation:
The difficulty can be framed as an aporetic dyad. We have two propositions each of which makes a very strong claim on our acceptance, but which seem to be such that they cannot both be true. They are individually plausible to a very high degree, but collectively inconsistent. The dyad displayed:
a) Everything other than God is created and sustained by God and is nothing at all in itself apart from this ongoing creation and sustenance. Everything other than God is an object of the divine mind the Being of which is exhausted by its objecthood.
b) Among creatures are free, autonomous agents that have been released into ontological independence and so exist in themselves as subjects in their own right and not as mere objects of the divine mind.
This aporia is what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation. To solve it one would have to show either that one of the limbs of the dyad is false, or that the limbs are logically consistent.
I have no idea how to solve it. And apparently Ratzinger did not know how to solve it either: after stating it, he went on to something else. I conjecture, although I cannot strictly prove, that the problem is absolutely insoluble by minds of our discursive/dianoetic constitution. If so, is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?
If an impossibility, then God as classically understood cannot exist. (Some will opt for deism as a solution, but it has its own problems.) But for all we know we might be in the presence of a mystery: the solution to the aporetic dyad might exist but lie beyond our ken. Perhaps our cognitive architecture such as it is here below bars access to the solution. That is an epistemic possibility.
Perhaps we should say that the sui generis, absolutely unique status of God and his relation to the world is good reason to withhold both appellations, ‘realism’ and ‘idealism.’ Perhaps classical theism cannot be fit neatly into that oppositional schema. Still and all, classical theism is closer to idealism than anything that could be called realism.
6) The tension between the noetic/gnostic versus the eschatological, mentioned above, Thomas Merton sees as a tension between contemplation and eschatology. He says he will always be “committed to the latter.” (Journals, vol. 5, p. 181, entry of 22 December 1964.) An on p. 182: “what this means is that my faith is an eschatological faith, not merely a means of penetrating the mystery of the divine presence resting in Him now.”
7) A related problem is that “I cannot suffer the loss of my immortal soul” if I am ‘already’ the eternal Atman. Is the world a vale of soul-making or of Self-realization? Does it matter how I live here below? Is there something really at stake? How could there be if there is no individual soul either to save or to lose?