No Exodus for You!

We left off with the idea that history is the flow of presence characterized by the intersection of time and eternity, or vertical and horizontal.

If there were only horizontality, there could be no awareness of time, no history, no now, and no humanness. We inhabit an ambiguous space indeed, where time passes and we are aware of its passing, but which can only be recognized from above, beyond, or outside time.

No wonder humanness cannot be described without ambiguity or ambi-valence, without a "nevertheless" or "having said that": mortal and immortal, animal and divine, earthy and celestial, body and soul, intellect and passion, etc. Why, it reminds us of God himself, about whom nothing can be said without immediate qualification, since he is beyond any univocal or mono-logical attribute.

As we've iterated and reiterated any number of times, man is composed of irreducible complementarities, male and female being only the most obvious. Qualify that: not totally irreducible, since one of the complements is usually prior, even in the Godhead.

For example, the Father is mysteriously "prior" to the Son, but certainly not temporally, since there was never the Father without the Son. Moreover, they are coequal branches of the Godhead, sharing the identical substance.

We also left off with an observation about the historical omnipresence of the Logos. We could say that the Logos is precisely that which illuminates the space -- the presence -- where eternity bisects time. John says as much, about the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world.

Seriously, where do you think the Light comes from? Physics? Chemistry? Natural selection? If that's what you think, then you haven't yet begun to think, and certainly not about thinking.

Christ is both the "historical Christ," with a "pre-" and "post-" in time, and the divine timelessness, omnipresent in the flow of history, with neither a "pre-" nor a "post-" (Voegelin).

This seems perfectly clear to me in all its ambivalence. You can try to eliminate the ambivalence, but only at the cost of clarity. Call it Bob's Certainty Principle of Uncertainty, and vice versa. (Voegelin says something to the effect that our quest for truth in the luminous in-between is ultimately penultimate; the moment we default to ultimate ultimacy -- i.e., collapse the vertical tension -- we descend into ideology.)

So many of the early church councils accomplished precisely this: the specification of ambiguity with great precision, e.g., one God in three persons, two natures in one person, one scripture and multiple authors, etc. -- all simultaneously clear and ambiguous, AKA clearobscuro. With this in mind, we see

God reaching into man and revealing himself as the Presence that is the flow of presence from the beginning of the world to its end. History is Christ written large.

The inter-mediate nature of consciousness itself allows us to think about the inter-mediate nature of everything else, in that everything is mediated by vertical and horizontal. Man is both temporal and transtemporal, every time. And timeless.

Alienation. What is it? And why are leftists by definition so alienated?

Well, alienation is our lot, isn't it? Genesis 3, once upon a time and every time. Because of the ambivalent structure outlined above, man is never going to feel fully at home in this world. We can try, but there just aren't enough drugs. We're always shadowed by sobriety, and always vulnerable to persecution by reality and conscience. These two nuisances can never be vanquished except in Democrat politicians.

The symbol "alienation" is meant to express a feeling of estrangement from existence in time because it estranges us from the timeless: we are alienated from the world in which we live when we sense it to be the cause of our alienation from the world to which we truly belong; we become strangers in the world when it compels conformity to a deficient mode of existence that would estrange us from existence in truth.

This alienation can be wrongly expressed in a multitude of good and bad ways, as foreign country (good), desert (fine), class struggle (stupid), identity politics (evil), patriarchy (hysterical), white privilege (pathetic), Trump derangement (sick), etc. All share one thing in common: enslavement in Egypt. But unlike the Jews, they reject any and all possibilities of exodus, because their very lives are structured by the master-slave intra-temporal dialectic.

The only real way out is by the ceiling, not the door. Indeed, the doors aren't even guarded anymore. People of all races and creeds are free to walk right through but will still feel alienated, from Don Lemon to LeBron James to Barack Obama to countless other Millionaires of Color.

This is why the most important thing to know about any leftist is who's your daddy? For feminists it is Daddy; for professional Blacks, white privilege; for homosexual activists, heteronormativity; for Islamists, Judaism and Christendom; for our trolls, Cousin Dupree.

The essence of ideology -- and we'll have to resume this discussion tomorrow -- is the pathological effort to eliminate the alienation by forcing this world to be a place without alienation, AKA utopia. Being that utopia is noplace and nohow, this strategy assures there will be no solution and increased alienation despite so much improvement in, say, race relations. You will have noticed that the better they are, the more alienated and angry is the race activist. No exodus for you!

Aphorisms:

He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain.

Today the individual rebels against inalterable human nature in order to refrain from amending his own correctable nature.

Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.

The only possible progress is the internal progress of each individual. A process that concludes with the end of each life. --Dávila