Diremption & Salvation

 

Painting by Darwin Leon

DIREMPTION & SALVATION

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

A ''diremption'' is a violent divorce or split, sometimes identified as a "fall" into self-consciousness, which presents an objective world in opposition to the willing subject, now conscious of itself as an independence restrained, therefore, at once, dependent for its existence on outside forces to which it must respond in one way or another to perpetuate its existence.

Hence human self-consciousness is, in its radical division or the division at its root, is a moral division, a consciousness of good and evil that is not identical to the awareness of pleasure of pain that other animals experience - to humans, ''good'' might be painful, while ''evil'' might be pleasurable.

In other words, the individual is separated from its mother and is born or falls into the world where it soon discovers it is not omnipotent, that it is opposed to an it or object or objection.

Everything in its essence would continue forever in its existence unimpeded. The individual infant is in fact born free as a matter of ''natural right,'' for ''right'' is ''freedom'' and the infant, in its initial, unreflective feeling of omnipotence, is absolutely free by the essential ''nature'' of life, which is absolute freedom or love: "What is love? Love is your life." (Swedenborg). Whom do you really love when you are separated from the one you love?

So the infantine individual is cradled in love, and then encounters resistance to its will and is enraged at the violation of its inherent natural right. It soon perceives that its hate may further endanger it, and, fearing retaliation, works out a compromise by projecting its self-love onto others; that is, by loving others and imitating them for its own good, thus becoming a self-conscious person in the sense that a ''person'' is a socialization of the individual that would be absolutely free if only it could. The person masks the individual actor that it might survive, but the in-divid-ual is aware of its internal division.

The individual somehow ''knows'' it is not its real self but is playing a role, is really a hypocrite, an actor with an underling crisis, a ''hypo-crisis.'' The pleasant external smile of the person may disguise the inner pain, even to the point where the person is, as a matter of habit, unaware of the split, unaware of his own hypocrisy and ambiguity, for the full awareness of the same can make a man "sick," in need of a doctor.

While the normal man lives an anxious life distracted by social illusions, the sick man or woman is said to be closer to the reality of existence, or closer to God, or to the ultimate Power over him or her. And the nearer to death, the more intimate the individual, which would be absolutely free from restriction, is to the omnipotent maker that is Power over all individuals.  The isolate is then metaphysically healed by atonement with the universal.

The ancient Greek doctors were ''saviors,'' physicians of mind and body who could heal the sick in body and raise the depressed to life.

For example, Luke, Paul's partner, was a "beloved physician." Of course Jesus was their Savior of saviors. The personal saviors did not simply provide the sick man with some drug or procedure, and with psychological counseling to restore him to normal mental health, for they saw normal life itself as a disease unto death, and sensed that, unless the patient were raised to and reconciled with the Power or Spirit, sending him back to a vicious society where individuals are divided within and without - amongst themselves in a war of all against all - would be like feeding a man to the sharks in order to save him, or, as our sick society does, heals a condemned man in order to execute him.

So diremption is a violent divorce in need of healing. The person suffers from that wound. Antibiotics and serotonin reuptake inhibitors will not heal that wound. What is prescribed is the Word, the Good News. He needs redemption. In that alone is he, as a painful synthesis of mind and body, reconciled to the spirit that transcends both.

"This we find in the Gospels, where the infinity of Spirit - its elevation into the spiritual world (as the exclusively true and authorized existence) - is the main theme. With transcendent boldness does Christ stand forth among the Jewish people: 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,' he proclaims in the Sermon on the Mount, - a dictum of the noblest simplicity, and pregnant with an elastic energy of rebound against all the adventitious appliances with which the human soul can be burdened. The pure heart is the domain in which God is present to man: he who is imbued with the spirit of the apothegm is armed against all alien bonds and superstitions. The other utterances are of the same tenor: ''Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God." (G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History)

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