Paracelsus and the God Beyond God

  

Jung, in his essay “Paracelsus as Spiritual Phenomenon”, mentions a verse by Angelus Silesius that may well, he thinks, be Paracelsan in inspiration.  It goes as follows: “I am like God and God like me. I am as Large as God, He is as small as I. He cannot above me, nor I beneath him be.” This he relates to the following statement by Paracelsus: “I under God and God under me”. This language is jarring enough to comment on. For Jung it is the language of suppressed humanist revolt (which it may in part be) though I would suggest a different approach is possible. Paracelsus, perhaps, experiences a divine/human polarity in which each term is relative to the other though each operates in and through the other. The basis of this duality or polarity is an occluded principle of identity which is, in the divine/human polarity, sundered. God self-actualizes in the human and the human self-actualizes in God. Behind God as one term in a conceptual polarity (the God who is ‘creator of the created’) is the principle which is giving of the difference by sustaining and transcending both sides (perhaps like water flows around and through a fish). Such a conception is to be found in Sufism though perhaps it is more implicit in Western theology. Psychologically speaking there is a projection of an ontic God who is ‘other’ to the human though Parcelsus, as Silesius, ALSO experiences the divine ground as pervading yet exceeding the self. Thus, the grammatical distinctions of pronoun become unstable, merging and separating according to context.

This may not be so alien to standard theology (in the west) as at first it may sound. One might read it as a rigorous application of the notion that God is trans-generic. Aquinas says that the highest in a genus is cause of all that is in that genus. Thus the sun, as the hottest thing, generates all lesser heat. In a sense, it is heat itself. If though, we tease out this idea a bit we make some interesting discoveries. The sun is not the hottest thing as receiving the most heat. It is not the hottest thing but is pure heat as what generates heat by its own intrinsic aptitude (i.e fire). One might say that it is not really IN the genus of hot things because it is the cause of what is in that genus. Say I had a piece of ice and a chunk of molten rock. The ice and the rock can be compared in terms of heat. The ice has very little heat and the rock a great deal. They both fall in the genus ‘things with heat’ though they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The ice perhaps has as little heat as one can have and the molten rock the most (if we posit a universe consisting of water and rock). The sun though does not fall ‘under’ this genus for it is not a thing being compared to other things but is equivalent to the term of comparison. All that is less than the sun is measured by the sun and thus does not stand comparison to it in terms of greater or less. Or, if we like, the ‘highest in any genus’ is not really IN the genus in the sense that it is the condition of all differences (all relative participations) within that genus. As such it is not ‘higher or lower’ except in a manner of speaking grounded in the inadequacy of human language. Nor is it ‘above or below’ or ‘inside or outside’ or indeed ‘active as relative to passive’ or ‘one as relative to many’. It is non generic and non-categorical. Of course the sun is determinate relative to other physical principles so if we are to ‘grasp’ the divine nature (in the sense of grasping how it cannot be grasped) it would be as radically trans-generic with respect to all genera (such that its 'properties' are only the transcendental ones of being, unity and goodness etc.). 

One then could imagine our bit of ice imagining god as a molten rock, as the hottest thing it can imagine. From the standpoint of language this would be fine. The bit of ice would project the molten rock as its ideal image of the good. It would project a perfection outside and above itself as something to which it aspires. This would be equivalent to the standpoint of ordinary religious conceptions.  Of course at a more advanced level of discourse, a deconstructive discourse if you like, our lowly piece of ice might realize that heat is something of which he has no determinate conception and that he stands in the same mysterious relationship to it as the hottest object he can imagine; in relation to heat itself both he and a chunk of lava are as nothing. Heat is above and below and inside and around all at once. With this in mind he might well realize that beyond his projected ‘concept’ of the divine (which is, as it were, a bit of internally generated ‘content’) is a ‘unity prior to the one’ (as Iamblichus might put it though in an ontological not psychological context) or a ‘God prior to God’ of whom one might use language rather like that of Paracelsus or Silesius. Further, to court controversy, I would add that Jung (steeped as he was in the language of Eckhart, Boehme and Schelling) did not, as he perhaps thought, succeed in naturalizing the language of mysticism in terms of an empirical psychology. Rather, he has reprisinated its basic data. I suspect his real achievement was to demonstrate how deep into the ordinary human psyche such paradoxical formulations must go.