La Femme

The Dragon and the Woman

D. M. Hoven

I have been often in contemplation of late on the nature of our cosmos. In adolescence I was enamored with the story of physics, how it purported to give explanation to the entire business of our reality, and seemed to take no prisoners in that regard, especially when it came to ‘dated speculations’ of the kind found in the introduction to the Hebrew Bible. I no longer have any such childish superstition about the all-encompassing truth of mechanics and thermodynamics, they certainly give either too few or too many answers to the man who awakes from his dreams about the clockwork of the cosmos, and must get to the business of the day at hand. Old books on the other hand have no shortage of utility for the same, they directly address the reality knowable to a human being, and not a particle collider. As I have aged some and my vision cleared, I finally find myself in the position to return to the dreamy enterprise of the ‘workings of things,’ although I now recruit physics as man of letters recruits a sturdy desk, a platform on which to think, and not a replacement for that weighty tome atop the desk, with the gold-trimmed leaves, and the worn leather binding.

There is little that is more difficult for the writer than the exposition of a theological idea. Theology is, by the very nature of the Being it seeks to understand, simple. This simplicity is the inverse of what might be considered intellectual simplicity. Quantum mechanics is the simplest theory ever conceived in all of physics. However, it is utterly foreign to the intuition, given that it deals with matter in a state in which the human person has never encountered it. Most either hilariously misunderstand it, or, as Niels Bohr said of those who were not profoundly shocked by it, that they ‘haven’t understood it enough.’ The classical physicists relied upon physical and even theological intuitions about the nature of reality from which to spin their theorems, and therefore ended up weaving their assumptions of the macroscopic world into them. Newton would have been at a loss without the proverbial apple (as certainly a necessary thought experiment if historical myth). Galileo could not have conceived of his falling spheres being extended along the entire trajectory of flight simultaneously, nor could Kepler have imagined curved spacetime instead of curves in space and time. Their first principles, inertia, gravity, and orbits, turned out to be unimaginably complex averages of billions of interactions occurring on a scale of which they had no knowledge. What seemed to be the laws of Optics to Newton turned out to be a sprawling series of probabilistic interactions for little objects that couldn’t quite decide whether they exist as a tiny marble might, at a point, or extended along an oscillating trajectory, as does a stretched rubber band. What Galileo took for granted as a measurable principle of reality itself is still not fully understood as the action of either inertia along the shortest path in a curved coordinate system, or the sum of a trillion trillion virtual particles from an invisible field ‘bouncing' against the falling sphere, or some as yet un-conceived synthesis of both. The purpose of this foray into modern physics is to illustrate the difference between a simple object, the photon, and a complex object, the sun. The mind has a far easier time grasping the behavior of the sun, as it is an ordinary part of human reality, and has been since our first parents witnessed their first sunset. God is as much simpler than the photon as the photon is simpler than the sun. He exists further from our conception of reality than the wildest discovery of modern cosmologists does from the Ancient Babylonians. We inevitably weave assumptions about our created, temporal reality into our propositions about His infinite, uncreated reality. Thus even a very simple theological idea, perhaps especially a very simple one, can present a steep incline for the writer to climb.

I recently ran into this paradoxical pitfall when I announced with gusto to my brother with whom I was discussing theology, that “the attractor is feminine”. I had never been more aware of the gap between the simplicity of an idea, and the Sisyphean task of explaining it rhetorically. This because every word in the sentence requires definition, simplification, specification, exposition, elevation, and clarification. But no so much that the idea itself is buried beneath definitions, simplifications, specifications, etc… This further illuminates the density of ancient stories, and their constituent symbols. The Ouroboros is a symbol of the attractor, as is the mermaid, and the Madonna. Further, in the last two symbols, the reality of the ‘feminine’ is perfectly clear. But to explain the same while preserving the mystery of the thing, yet not relying upon mystery as an excuse for poor explanation, is a daunting task. I suppose however that there is no time like the present to do a thing, especially a difficult one, so with a brief petition for the Madonna’s aid, we shall begin!

The world ‘attractor’ is one I have purloined from the language of chaos theory. It formally refers to a geometric structure of a low dimensionality that a mathematical or physical system of a higher dimensionality resolves to in time with great repeatability. An example would be the two dimensional spiral structure of a galaxy of billions of stars, or the identifiable shape of the cumulous cloud, or the infinitely varied but recognizable structures of turbulent vortices, from hurricanes to whirlpools. I could give a dozen more such examples, but the idea I have stolen from this mathematical language is the prospect of a guiding agent, that causes a process, the which on first glance seems purely random, to exhibit regular behavior. A weighted die is a simple attractor. The action of gravity on the die tilts the otherwise evenly distributed random number generator (in principle) towards repetition of a single outcome. There is a truth revealed in this simple example. A certain bit of information, call it ‘abstract information’, exists before the die is ever tossed, and that information guides the outcome of every toss. The information is that I have weighted it. I am here contrasting abstract with particular information, which would be the outcome of a given roll, or number of rolls. The scientist presented with this die could construct a probability distribution from the particular information, and infer the weighting from this set of observations. This further explains the meaning of “abstract” information as that which may only be realized by the application of intelligence to particular information. The example of the die is a poor one, as the whole business is manmade, from the numbers on the die, to my sly altering of it’s expected behavior. But from this thought experiment it can be understood that in a more subtle sense, the random processes in the world around us, what might be termed ‘chance,’ can be influenced by attractors that render specific outcomes likelier than others. There are physical attractors, but also metaphysical ones. We have all known that one friend, that, for one reason or other, seems to run into unmitigated bad circumstance, or another, who cannot seem to fail in whatever they do. Jung said that those elements of our own stories we did not understand would be played out in the world as ‘fate’. What I shall here take from this thought of his is the influence that narratives (or in the context of this argument, ‘abstract metaphysical information’) have on the temporality of ensouled beings. The attractor in the sense which I mean to use it, refers to this causal agent within the many random circumstances of the human life.

Now that this cold definition of the attractor has some purchase in the reader’s mind, we shall proceed to the warm definition.

A mermaid is an attractor. It pulls the sailor out of the course of his normal life into a realm of enchantments, one in which the sailor, in the typical tale, dies, or narrowly escapes to tell the tale of less fortunate ‘mateys’. The witch is a similar character, although she is seductive for what she claims to offer: be it love, happiness, or wealth, rather than preternatural sexual joys. She transforms a hapless (or not so hapless) man into a beast or amphibian, in a symbol trapping him within his base nature, be it gluttony, lust, or greed, and depriving him of the rational intellect through which he might otherwise find freedom. The truth will set you free, and conversely, the lie will make you slave. The Madonna on the other hand calls a man out of his self-centered slump, and into a chaste romance, in which his soul is filled with all the manly virtues of courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. Furthermore, the Madonna serves as a kind of bridge, pulling the soul from merely human things into contemplation of, and communion with, Divine things. The Virgin shows us her Son, and we know Him truly as not a kind of miraculous projection of the Divine essence into a fleshly apparition, but as a Man. God, in Man, the Incarnation, born of woman, into a world to Him as natural and tangible as ours, and yet of which He is the author. What the Gnostics believed to be ‘God’ and ‘Demiurge’ are not in fact warring deities, but warring principles, one which draws man into himself, imprisoning him within passion and animalistic hunger for physical pleasure, and the other, which draws mankind into the great ‘leaving of the self,’ be it for the care of family, the love of king or country, and the contemplation of the good, true, and beautiful: those transcendental markers in our physical reality of God Himself.

However, and this is the real idea of the thing, the attractor is feminine. These competing principles, unlike the weighted die, do not force themselves upon the soul, or deterministically order the life of a man. There is in fact a Wyrd within the world, but it is not a fixed thing. Arthur does not have to pick up Excalibur, and Oedipus is not mechanically driven to kill his father. Oedipus is unaware of his own story and the characters in it, and that story plays out for him as fate. Jung is clapping along somewhere. But fate is a thing waiting, like sleeping beauty or Snow White, for the masculine, that is the active part of reality of which mankind is a participant, to act on it. Narratives do not thrust themselves upon us. They lie in wait, for us to apply to them our will and reason, that human power, and from that stamen the pistil of narrative yields the fruit of destiny. We are however, as creatures possessed of weakened wills and damaged reason, blind as Oedipus to the truth of things, likely to copulate with those attractors that ensnare the soul, and set us off in chase of our own tail, to feed on ourselves with ever increasing hunger.

It was this state of things that drove the Creator to curse mankind to a life of tilling the ground for his food, wherein this necessary death to the indulgence of the self - ensnared as it had become in the trap laid by the deceiver, a character to whom we shall turn in due time - could in time bear fruit to the cultivation of that higher reason that drives the soul to desire better things, and seek more wholesome food than it’s own shed skin. This desire was not itself fruitful. It gave birth to the best that Pagan civilization ever saw, the philosophy of the Greeks, the order and efficiency of the Romans, the awe and wonder of the Norsemen. But the fruits of this desire were limited on the one hand by that material success it gave rise to (the tower of babel is forever under construction), and on the other by that Original Fault, the substitution of the mind of God with the mind of man. Our ancestors could limit the power of the ouroboric attractor over their lives, but they could only know it’s contrary in principle, as the Logos, the Natural Law, that remnant of the Divine in the fallen mind of man. But as a mere idea, it had no life in it. Socrates conscience told him what he must not do, it had no positive reality into which to draw him.

In the Madonna is the whole of the creation story re-told. For God no longer speaks to cold matter, which blindly responds to his will, and from which he molds Adam at will. Rather the voice of God comes upon a feminine that is as full of potential as that primordial chaos, but is not blindly receptive, as the beginning was to the creation, but rather choses the will of the Creator for herself, accepting His word “be it done according to me according to thy word” as the seed from which to bear the fruit of a new kind of reality, one which could be united to the Holy Spirit without pause, question, or hesitation. For such human things would prevent or limit the action God sought to undertake, the creation of Himself in human form. In strict contrast to the creation of the first man, the Second Man is created with the willful consent of the ‘dust’ from which He is formed. The Madonna is therefore Co-creator of God the Son! She is in true fact, plain as can be, Mother of God. We can return to this point with the language supplied by the earlier exploration of the feminine attractor. It is in this passive, but contingent manner, that she co-operates in the Incarnation. She is not the ‘prime-mover’ to borrow the language of philosophers. This point of confusion often comes up with those who have not rightly considered this distinction, and they balk at the idea that God could have a mother, for it suggests contingency to His being, a rejection of the monotheistic principle itself.

Let us return then to the narrative at hand, but in this new light. God could not, truly, enter into human realty by force. Were God to form a body from the dust of the ground, and inhabit the same, he would not participate in the attractor of physical reality that so defines human existence. He would be as a ghost in a machine, the very realization of that Platonic ideal. No, to be ensouled as a human being is to have one’s life-force drawn in by the willing and receptive woman, to be directed and embodied, that is, incarnated, in the flesh of a child. This is truly the great mystery of our reality, but it is clear as day that were God not to enter into this relationship with the feminine, His would be a rape of our reality, akin to the doings of the fallen angels of the Antediluvian Age.  God certainly chose Mary for his mother, but what is so often missed in this story, is that Mary, as surely as He chose her, chose Him as her son, and thereby the Holy Spirit as her Spouse. This is not a mystery we can fully grasp in this life, but there is one further idea we can gain a sense of from this exploration. While God is an all-powerful being, and could at any moment lift the sin from his mother, enabling the fully willed, fully understood acceptance of His word, doing so would itself be a negation of the very cooperation He desired of The Blessed Virgin. It would be an un-willed salvation, a Calvinistic pre-destination, that is, a fate. The feminine is, as I have sought with so many words to express, not a fate. God did not fatalistically enter our reality, for were he to do so, he would render silly the entire human enterprise. For if God could interdict human will fatalistically, he could remove from humanity sin itself, and the infinity of His love makes the same inevitable.

On this point are so many kept at the brim of Theism, unable to make sense in their minds of this apparent contradiction. Further, the plan of salvation cannot be understood if this necessary cooperation of human will in Divine Will in the Incarnation is missed. God did not fatalistically redeem some segment of mankind, as so many today believe. He chose a woman, who willingly chose Him, free from the bondage of sin, which darkens the reason, and weakens the will, to be the co-creator of the Heir of Promise. We see this reality foreshadowed in Abraham, who attempts to bring about the Heir by copulating with a slave, a bond-woman. Hagar is the unredeemed feminine, incapable of receiving the Life promised by God, and giving birth to a perversion of the Promised child, an eternal enemy to the same. But Sarah is made supernaturally capable of giving birth to the Heir of promise, giving birth ‘even in her old age.’ In a mirrored way is Mary kept supernaturally free of the stain of Original sin, and preserved sinless throughout her life on earth, for only in such a state could she truly receive the life of God into herself willingly, and in so doing fulfill the plan of the Redeemer. It was only in this manner that the Son of God could truly offer his life as a propitiation for Sin. The life gained in any other manner would have been the parody of life that results from a Divine rape of the cosmos, a kind of joke on humanity, a demonstration of what we could never be. But by entering reality through the will and cooperation of the Blessed Virgin, true God of true God, could be “human from the essence of His mother.” And that Human, being fully God and fully Man, could, of His own submission to the Will of the Father, will that submission that fallen man never could. But the role of the Madonna does not cease with the birth of Christ, she is the attractor of His own destiny. It is she who calls him to make water from wine, entering his ministry! When she passed into the next life, her being was transformed from the particular attractor of the Son of Man into that which attracts all men, draws all reality, up, and into it’s eternal destiny as co-heirs with her Son, Jesus Christ. How better is her position described than in Revelation 12, where we see her crowned as the Queen of Heaven itself, the place not only of eternal perfection, but eternal increase. She is the eternal feminine, the eternal receptive and guiding principle, that responds to love by increasing that love, to beauty by rendering it yet more beautiful, and to truth by showing it more clearly. She waits in the space between spaces, to unite our own destinies, and call them all from their self-possessing isolation into communion with Her Son, who gave his Body for us to become in us the life that never ends, and the waters that well up within us to eternal joy. It is this conception of the feminine, and it’s sacred role, which must return to our study of the cosmos, and of ourselves, if we are ever to make sense of either.