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Thoughts on the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception of the Regina del Cielo

Posted December 11th, 2011 by Michael Erickson
In recognition of the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception of the Regina del Cielo, Michael Erickson offers the following thoughts in a letter to a friend.

I hope that this email finds you and your family doing well. As I write these words, there are fireworks flaring and bombs blasting. The beat of the Mariachi can be heard bouncing cleanly through the dark, cold sky. We are far enough from the Jardin for the jubilation to be no more than a persistent murmur, the cadence of a people who know well how to masquerade the sorrows of life in and through an unending series of fiestas and religious observances. There is an altar at the end of the calle on which we are living now - a religious shrine put up by the people in the neighborhood, which centers on an oversized, open tabernacle. Inside the tabernacle, in full regalia, is the Regina del Cielo, the Queen of Heaven, standing atop the head of the baby Jesus, a common icon here in Mexico.

That she reigns inside the tabernacle is telling. The tabernacle is not just the point of nexus between men and heaven. Rather, it is the nexus point of men with God, though any such interrelationship is of the nature of heaven. If the Regina del Cielo resides inside the tabernacle, then she is a goddess, the "fourth person" of what really amounts to a Holy Quadernity. From a classical, Christian perspective, this cannot but be problematic, though perhaps there is a deeper truth, one even more penetrating than what appears in the Nicene Creed, in this deification of the Virgin Mary. Does not Christ Jesus Himself state the men born into His body and blood, the communion of the faithful, share through and with Him the same relationship with the Father that He has in eternity? This is explicit in John 17 - the prayer that He proclaims publicly shortly before being handed over to the Sanhedrin - and implicit in many other passages. If so, then perhaps the Virgin Mary is an icon of the faithful, or more precisely of the hope that the faithful have in Christ Jesus.

Having said as such, there is a fine - and most important - line between having the same relationship with the Father as the Son enjoys in eternity and actually becoming Gods. The key word here is "becoming." Anything that "becomes" divine by definition is not divine; it is a facsimile, perhaps, or a dangerous perversion, more likely; but it is not God. God is in Himself in eternity; God does not "become," as if at one time He was not. We settled this matter in the resolution of the Aryan controversy - the very conflict within the Church which set into motion the Nicene Council. Today, the "Aryans" who postulate a "becomingness" to God are the process theologians. For them, the Son is not co-eternal with the Father; He is a created being, albeit the "first fruits of all creation," even higher than the highest of all of the angels. He "becomes" God, in virtue of the will of the Father; we "become" God, in and through Christ Jesus, the person in whom God vested His will.

Historically, the Aryans are separated from the Gnostics; and yet, when we delve into the essence of their teachings, we see a common predilection. If, as the Aryans postulate, the God of revelation is characterized by "becomingness," then by definition this "God" cannot be the eternal God, since "becomingness" and eternality are incompatible. The eternal God therefore must not be the God of revelation. He - or more precisely It - must be unrevealed, which is to say unknowable. We now have the unknowable "One" separated from its lesser aeons; and we have one of those lesser aeons, the Demiurge, actually being the "God" of revelation, the "God" who creates the cosmos.

The epistemological implications are clear. If the foundation of creation is a lesser aeon, a Demiurge that manifests its predilection for malevolence in the very fact of masquerading as the God which it is surely not, then chance (which is how we would see the changeable will of a perverse Demiurge) prevails over truth (which is "truth" in that it is reflective of the unchanging will of the eternal God Himself). In this view, philosophical realism necessarily gives way to deconstructionism. Indeed, the entire cosmos is deconstruction of itself; it is all imagination, a fairy tale to be negated (Buddhism) or a "vision" to be molded by the few with the gnosis to do so (Gnosticism). I am reminded here of the legalistic answer provided by President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky controversy: In the end, it depends upon what the meaning of "is" is. In this deconstructionist cosmos, there is no "is." There is no point from which even to postulate that there is no "is." Absurdity prevails, the last, loony laughs of the Demiurge ringing the edges of a cosmos falling in upon itself.

In this view, the view of a "becoming" God, of a Demiurge that reigns tyrannically over a cosmos that is not real, there is no recourse but superstition. True religion cannot prevail, because men cannot have a relationship with God. Instead, in a world of chance, we may only hope to be on the right side of chance more often than otherwise. We may only hope to remember our ancestors, who succumbed to the same terror which prevails in our own lives, thus seeing at least some lasting continuity in this world of chance that offers hope that it will last for some time in the future. Ours may be a world of chance, but it has been a world of chance for a long time; and, in that fact alone, we may find some solace.

I am not surprised, then, that the deification of the Virgin Mary, the implicitly Aryan view that God is "becoming" (in this case, "becoming" from a Holy Trinity to a Holy Quadernity), accompanies a folk religion that is essentially superstitious in nature and focused almost entirely on a cult of the ancestors. I say here a "cult of the ancestors," as distinguished from a classical, Christian "cult of the saints." With the former, all that we really have, at the end of the day, are our ancestors; with the latter, all that we really have is the Father Himself, the fullness of God living in and through the communion of the saints, as they in turn are living in and through Him and one another. With the former, the deification of the Virgin Mary is totally understandable: She is our Mother, an icon of our ancestors, a living memory that we have been able to overcome the adversity of living in this cruel world for many centuries and may have hope to do so for centuries to come (though, again, that is in the end a hope without basis, since the world is characterized by a capricious chance, the expression of the changeable will of a "becoming" God). With the latter, the deification of the Virgin Mary is not acceptable: She is the Mother of Christ Jesus, the symbol of the Church Faithful, and thus worthy of veneration; but she is not the "fourth person" of some sort of Holy Quadernity, because the God who reveals Himself as the Holy Trinity is also the eternal God, the unchangeable God, the God who is and is not therefore "becoming."

In the moments after the Pentecost experience, Saint Peter delivers a moving sermon to those who had been just baptized in the Holy Spirit. He remarks that the toughest sell for Christians, as they go about preaching the Gospel, will be the fact of the Resurrection. In the past, when I had reflected upon this passage, I had assumed that he meant only that the fact of the Resurrection would be hard for most people to accept. After all, while rare, there had been miracle workers, including holy men who healed diverse illnesses, excised devils, and even walked on water. The actual teachings of Jesus Christ - that men should love God and one another and that the Kingdom of God was at hand - were not exclusive to him, though perhaps no one else had articulated them as well as He had in His several years of active ministry. The fact that He died on the Cross would not be hard to take, as many religious figures had died for their causes. No, Saint Peter seemed to be saying, the real stumbling block would be the fact of this Resurrection, that it actually happened, in a manner appropriated by our senses in the real, tangible world, rather than it being simply a metaphor for the power of His teachings.

I have no doubt that this is part of what Saint Peter is saying; but, upon further reflection, I think that he is saying more. A "becoming" God evolves in a specific direction. It may take centuries; but, in hindsight, we see that all along He has been emerging, "becoming" what He is now, and we men "becoming" aware of that "becomingness." From this point of view, the God of the Holy Trinity is "becoming" - and, indeed, at least since the birth of the Virgin Mary, has been "becoming" - a Holy Quadernity. We men had an inkling of this "becoming" character of God, first among those few Apostles who knew the unique position that Mary the Mother of God had among them, then among a growing circle of the faithful, then much later among the vast majority of Christians, then as part of the Magisterial teachings of the Church Universal (the First and Second Infallible Statements spoken respectively by Pope Pius IX and Pope Pius XII). What is important is the natural, evolutionary progression, the circle of adherents to this Marian observance growing bigger and bigger, in similitude of the God of the Holy Trinity "becoming" in progressive stages the God of the Holy Quadernity.

The Resurrection, on the other hand, does not continue the natural, evolving order. It is the abrupt disruption and reversal of that order. It is not an emerging realization, a progression from death to more death to even more death; it is a reversal, from death to life, not just in the sense of the cycle of life, where winter gives way to spring, but in the sense of a quite specific dead thing reversing its natural course to be a quite specific living being. Only the eternal God, the God who transcends the changeable, chronological, temporal cosmos, the God who is characterized by His absolute unchangeableness, may effect as such. This is remarkable, because it means that the God of revelation - since of course the Resurrection as a sensual, factual event in history is the ultimate form of revelation - is the eternal God.

We may see then why Saint Peter sees this as the stumbling block. They will be preaching that the God of revelation is the eternal God. They will be taking on the Gnostics, not only those who spread their esoteric mumbo jumbo in the philosophical schools of their day, but those who infest the Church itself. Regardless of whatever may happen in history, because of this teaching, the Christians will not arise from the catacombs. They may become legal and even dominant politically; but they will remain in the catacombs, because many of the faithful (let alone those who remain outside the faith) will continue, if not in their words then in their hearts and in their folk religion, to reject the historicity of the Resurrection. Many of the faithful (let alone those who remain outside the faith) will continue to hedge their bets in the form of superstitious, ancestral worship, the kind that presupposes that the world is an afterthought of a cruel Demiurge, and that true, lasting redemption is not and can never be at hand. Like Saint Peter himself, who denied Christ Jesus three times, most will fail ever to grasp the historical reality and the future hope of the Resurrection, either from ignorance (which is forgivable) or from pride (as if we may be proud to envision ourselves the quaint play things of a perverse aeon, a foolhardiness which is itself a manifestation of ignorance of the worst sort). Most will prefer the superstitious, ancestral worship of a deified Regina del Cielo over the actual, real, historical Resurrection of Christ Jesus (or conversely will be inclined to see the latter as as much a fancy of the superstitious mind as the former cult).

These are my thoughts, as we celebrate here the Immaculate Conception of the Regina del Cielo. Thank you for indulging my elaborations, which may be off the mark and which may be of little relevance to your present political, philosophical, and theological considerations.

A Letter from a Friend to Michael Erickson

On December 14th, 2011 Michael Erickson says:
Actually, I apprehend the meaning of your speculations and find much of interest in them. Your hard distinction between the God of Being and the God of Becoming leads me to ask: If the God of Being is the Creator, and if the Creation is His alone, then must He not be the author of a universe of being and becoming? Does not the Creation reflect His will and His design? If so, has God created what is "other" than Himself? I have taken it from my understanding of Genesis that God encompasses all that is and all that will ever be which includes a universe of being AND becoming. In God's appearance as a man does He not demonstrate his capacity to become according to His nature? In short, could a God solely of Being take the form of a creation which has a beginning and an end, which is born, grows, is matured, and dies, and is resurrected? Another form of the question: Is the realm of Nature in its entirety, and the realm of man in part, not a reflection of the nature of the Creator? These inquiries come out of a reading of the Platonic dialogues and the general principle that like begets like in Aristotle. I have no thought that the Creator is contained by any form of human understanding, and most particularly by any category of human thought. It may be that Christianity brings in complicating factors that I do not well understand, but in Genesis, which I know well enough, God's word is a word of becoming. As I do remember, John says to the effect that "In the beginning was the Word and the Word BECAME flesh. The New Testament expression captures the connection between the unchangeable LOGOS and the changeable FLESH. Genesis is not so explicit, but in its totality it is not inconsistent with the New Testament account, just defined in greater detail. I have taken the view that the Old and the New Testaments cannot be inconsistent with one another. This drives me to wonder at the claim that Being and Becoming are distinct in the Creation. This idea is a human perspective which is always and forever partial and incomplete. To apply it to the Creator of all Being and all Becoming, seems odd. I do not mean to lean too heavily on your patience; but the answer to this question, if I have made myself clear, is critical to my understanding of gnosticism and also of Genesis. In fact, is not the word, Genesis, already an expression of a conjoined Being and Becoming? What consequences derive from this observation and what consequences from denying it? Your experience with Mexico matches my own. There is something pagan about it which is not unusual to find in nations that have come under the rule of the Catholic Church with its missionary strategy of parasitic invasion of hostile cultures. Yet, the combination seems also to be powerfully durable and resistant to modernity. Curious.

A Response from Michael Erickson to the Friend

On December 14th, 2011 Michael Erickson says:
There is an apparent incompatibility with a God which is characterized by His eternality and a God which is characterized by His "becomingness." It is analogous, not simply in a purely logical manner but substantively as well, to the apparent incompatibility with a God which is omniscient and a God which allows for a free will other than His own. Of the treatments that I have read over the years attempting to explain the latter dichotomy, my favorite is the one put forward by Boethius, the sixth century philosopher, who articulated in essence that God does not have foreknowledge - which obliterates the possibility of free will in someone other than God Himself - because God is timeless. Since we are bound within chronological time, the closest that we may approximate this kind of divine knowledge is to say that He knows everything in one, simultaneous present, or that past, present, and future collapse into one, eternal reality, the reality of the Godhead Himself. Of course, there is a problem with this view. If past, present, and future, with respect to the apprehension of the same in the mind of God, are characterized by being collapsed into the eternal reality of God, and if God is the basis of what is most true about anything or, in this case, any sensibility of time relation about several things, then we must conclude that past, present, and future are not real. They are as illusory as the imagination of pink elephants, a set of phantasms about how relations among things in space may be measured that indeed has nothing to do with how things in space actually relate to one another. After all, what we understand not to be true about God cannot then be true about us - in terms of our capacity for apprehension - or about the cosmos - in terms of what actually is in or of the cosmos. If this is true, then our entire basis for empiricism falls flat; or, to state it in another manner, if past, present, and future, as distinct apprehensions of time, have no intrinsic realities within the mind of God, then there is no alternative for men but deconstructionism, because one of the key components of any empirical observation of the world will be shown to be illusory. Before proceeding, I should clarify my comment above that what we deem not to be true of God cannot then be true of man or of the cosmos generally. A person may retort that there are many attributes that are not true of God but which are true of man. For example, God is not characterized by sin; and yet men are characterized by sin. Saint Augustine shows that sin is not an attribute in itself but the absence of an attribute - namely, the absence of being in a rightful relationship with God. Evil is not a reality but the absence of realness. To every extent that we are, we are like God; to every extent that we are different from God, we lack some attribute, either by our own descent into sin, or by the will of God not to fashion in the created being that which is incompatible with creation. Thus, what is true of God is also true of man; what is true of man is not necessarily true of God, or for that matter is not even real in itself at all, such as sin. By extension, what is not true of God cannot then be true of us. One manner by which we may solve the existential problem raised by the Boethius solution is to remark as follows: Past, present, and future do not collapse into an eternal present (an indelicate phrase, to be sure, since by definition eternality is atemporal and "present," even absent from past and future, connotes temporality); rather, they are contained wholly within an eternal present. God has foreknowledge of events in space, but that is contained wholly within His omniscience. Since what is true of one character of God is true of God in totality, because there is no divisibility in God, then His omniscience is wholly contained within His foreknowledge as well. Thus, when God foresees, He foresees in His own manner, which is to say in a manner that conforms with His will that men should have free will, since that will is also non-divisible from any other attribute of God. When God exercises His omniscience, at least with respect to beings that are in space, He exercises the same within the context of past, present, and future, as otherwise He would have no knowledge of beings that are in space and that He wills to be in space. Can God exercise His omniscience with respect to Himself then within the context of past, present, and future? If past, present, and future indeed remain intrinsically separable within His eternally omniscient mind, and if there is no divisibility in God, then God Himself must be characterized by past, present, future, as much as He is characterized by omniscience. What is key is that, if He is exercising self-omniscience, then He apprehends His own past as an eternal past, which is to say a past characterized by lacking nothing and accordingly beholding and maintaining all that is. He apprehends in His own past a past that completely contains in itself the present, the future, and all other realms of self-knowledge which have nothing to do with the relations characterized by past, present, and future - all the while still being intrinsically separable as the past. We ultimately cannot wrap our minds around such divine self-knowledge. If we endeavor so to do, then we are bound to strike our minds upon the same ceiling that had pushed back Job from his persistent wrangling. Nevertheless, we may make certain broad statements, which may be adapted to our former inquiries about God as "being" and God as "becoming." First, we may state, as you remark in your previous email, that indeed God is both "being" and "becoming," just as God is both characterized by His eternal omniscience and characterized by His knowledge of others and of Himself in the past, present, and future. Secondly, since God is non-divisible, His eternal being, which is characterized by unchangeableness (since there is nothing lacking by which to necessitate a change toward a more perfect reality, nor a predilection for sin and evil that would inspire a change from a more perfect reality), must be the same as His becoming. He "becomes," therefore, in an eternal manner, which is to remark that He "becomes" not from any lack of perfect reality, or from any necessity to be more than who He is (or, conversely, from any perverted will to be less than who He is), but as an attribute of His being. For God, being is becoming and becoming is being; neither collapses into the other, so that He is His unchangeable, eternal Self as He changes His will (for example, turning against Israel when Israel sins and then turning back to Israel when Israel seeks redemption), and His changing will is at all moments unchangeably eternal. The "process theologians" which I opposed in my previous email refer to a "becoming" God in such a manner as to disavow in essence His eternal being. They are essentially modern day pantheists, in that they reduce God into an evolutionary principle characteristic of what seems to prevail in space and time. I have no doubt that if and when materialists fashion a systemic alternative to said evolutionary principle, then their "God" will be characterized by that new process. The other extreme are those who acknowledge that God is eternal being without also acknowledging that He is just as much characterized by His becomingness. In my mind, Gnosticism falls into this category, since the Gnostics separate their aeons (their elaborate stages of becomingness) both epistemologically and ontologically from their One. As a side note, there has been a modern confluence of the pantheistic and Gnostic views, even if in essence they are in opposition to one another. For the Gnostic, the One is totally removed from the "becoming" world of the aeons, that is true; but, since the material world may be attributed to the willful act of an angelic being, or of some sort of spiritual force that is the modern take on the classical Demiurge, that spirit is interwoven into the very fabric of matter, much as the pantheist sees God submerged into the principles characteristic of the created universe. The pantheist in turn does not acknowledge a God which transcends the created universe, so his "God" is no longer an eternal, personal Being but more akin to that same, interwoven spirit. I believe that this is why we hear so much talk of "spirit" in modern parlance and of why there is an effort underway to eliminate the personal attributions of the God of the Old and New Testaments (replacing the "Father," characterized by His changing and at times, by our ears, harsh will, with some sort of ephemeral "Spirit," characterized by its capacity to make someone feel good and refreshed). I believe also that this confluence explains why modern day Gnosticism has become much more imbedded into the ritualized, earth focused religions, which used to be the exclusive purview of the pantheists (Gnostics in the Episcopal Church U.S.A., for example, essentially replacing the Father with a phony, soft Mother Gaia figure, thus feminizing the image of Jesus Christ and ascending "Spirit" to the highest level of religious expression). Gnosticism as such is no longer predominantly in the realms of esoteric philosophy; but rather, by being more subsumed into what passes as the pantheism of our time, is able as a cultic, ritualized teaching to spread more seamlessly into our culture. Pantheism in turn is able to suggest a higher, intellectual gravitas for itself. Returning to the comment that God is both being and becoming, and that He is non-divisible in Himself, it stands that a revelation by God to man of His eternal being cannot be divisible in essence from a revelation by God to man of His becomingness. I state "in essence" here because, as we are incapable of eternal apprehension, we apprehend epistemologically said eternal being as divisible from becomingness. Nevertheless, we must do so, while realizing that in essence God is non-divisible. Thus, if God reveals Himself as the Holy Trinity (which we know in faith to be indeed a divine self-revelation, since it is attributed to Christ Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew and later given added flesh by Saint Paul in his Epistles), then even as we apprehend His becomingness, we should not deduce that it is possible for Him to be in the process of becoming something other than the Holy Trinity. A divine self-revelation is a revelation of His eternal, unchangeable being, as much as it is indeed a revelation of His becomingness. For men to believe that God is revealing Himself as the Holy Quadernity in Himself, they must base that "revelation" in some word or event separable from the ministry of Christ Jesus and from Holy Scripture generally. Since, for a Christian, Christ Jesus is the final (not just historically but principally) revelation of God, and the Bible is the final, inerrant Word of God, there is no Christian basis to believe that God is revealing Himself now as the Holy Quadernity, notwithstanding how that evolving sensibility may seem emblematic of the "becoming" character of God in the world.