The Darwinian Gene Gnome Project to Ban the Most Liberary Books

The Absolute bears witness to itself in the form of Christ. I notice that this is a formulation Balthasar refers to number of times throughout The Glory of the Lord. He contrasts this with Eastern religions, "the essence of which is to give practical training in how to transcend one's own consciousness, how to make the finite spirit a vessel of the infinite Spirit -- a flute through which the inspiration wafts --, how to educate the spirit to renounce its own designs in order that the infinite designs may be realized through it."

I don't know how to reproduce the appropriate pneumaticʘʘns, but this difference would correspond to the symbol O with the upward ↑ or downward ↓ arrow inside, the former denoting the saint or mystic, the latter the Christ -- or, if you want to be a bit more general about it, the messiah, avatar, or God-man.

But to his disciples, the saint will become a kind of (small g) god-man, or flesh-made-word, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this so long as we maintain our perspective and do not absolutize the relative.

For just as the Absolute bears witness to itself in the form of Christ, the saint or mystic bears witness to the Absolute. Like a written text, we must "see through" and beyond him to that which he points. His sanctity or holiness or nobility are like windows through which the light of the Absolute radiates into the herebelow.

Since Balthasar is dealing with a theological aesthetics, the discernment of spirits is an irreducibly qualitative matter, analogous to discerning great beauty in a poem or painting. While he obviously regards dogma as indispensable, in another sense, merely being told, say, that Jesus was "the Word made flesh," can be as cold a proposition as being told that Bach was the greatest composer, but never actually hearing the music; and not just hearing it, but hearing it deeply, on an interior level -- on a level adequate to its composer's interior state.

So how does one "judge" the Gospels beyond mere circular arguments from authority? For Balthasar, it is "by the quality of this Word as one which bears witness to itself... by the fact that here it is not a case of a man 'transparent to God' who proclaims the wisdom he has learned [the circle with the upward arrow], but that from this man's mouth divine authority speaks from the I-form [the circle with the downward arrow]." You could say that only discernment of extrinsic qualities can lift us out of the intrinsically closed circle of mere quantities.

In short, Christ is "God speaking man," while the mystic is "man speaking God." Thus, "at the point of closest similarity we find the sharpest distinction" -- which is why, for example, Jesus is totally acceptable to Muslims so long as he is regarded as just another prophet -- like Mohammed, only with a less perfect message. The perfect message is the Koran, which is really a form of bibliolatry, of Word made paper instead of flesh.

But it is one thing for the Word to become paper, another thing entirely for it to become flesh. For we are told by biologists that the simplest human cell contains more information than all the books in the New York City library.

No. Actually, a quick google search establishes the fact that this is far too modest a claim. For example,

“The information content of a simple cell has been established as around [ten to the twelfth power] bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Evolutionist Richard Dawkins acknowledged that the cell’s nucleus 'contains a digitally coded database larger, in information content, than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica put together. And this figure is for each cell, not all the cells of a body put together.' Dr. Sagan estimated that if a person were to count every letter in every word in every book of the world’s largest library (approximately 10 million volumes), the total number of letters would be [ten to the twelfth power], which suggests that the 'simple cell' contains the information equivalent of the world’s largest library!"

So truly, compared to the most complex book, the human being is infinitely more complex. And what would it mean for each and every one of these cells to be infused with the divine light? Hard to say. For starters, probably something like this: "Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves; and He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light." Who knows. Might even explain the nuclear scorch marks on the Shroud of Turin as well.

Now, the divine-human book is far too deep for human beings to fully fathom, which is a kind of seal of its authenticity, is it not? "But here 'incomprehensibility' does not mean a negative determination of what one does not know, but rather a positive and almost 'seen' and understood property of him whom one knows" (Balthasar).

In other words, "the more a great work of art is known and grasped, the more concretely are we dazzled by its 'ungraspable' genius. We never outgrow something which we acknowledge to stand above us by its very nature" (emphasis mine).

Compare this formulation to that of the metaphysical Darwinists, the liztardian queeglings who regard man is nothing more than matter made flesh. For them, this is all a human being is and can ever be: a series of transient adaptations to an arbitrary exterior environment. But for the Raccoon, man is an interior adequation to the Absolute, by any memes necessary.

Evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists assure us that any human capacity, no matter how interior, sacred, beautiful, or intimate, is just an illusion -- a trick of the genes. Yes, goofy as it may sound, it takes more information than the world’s largest library just to spur you to enjoy coonjugal relations with your mate. Talk about overkill!

In the end, metaphysical Darwinism is the worst kind of crude anti-humanism, for it destroys the intrinsically human and drags everything down to the level of a meaningless competition for genetic survival. One can absolutely prove that metaphysical Darwinism is false simply by apprehending a single instance of absolute meaning.

For example, to know the simple but absolute truth that thou shalt not murder is to overturn that whole bloated Darwinian library. And if we can so easily invert that voluminous library, doesn't that imply something unique about the human station and its true liberary source?

Real human love is a greatway drug to the Divine plenitude, is it not? As Balthasar describes it, "Even the figure of a person whom we love and know well permanently remains for us too wonderful to exhaust by description, and, if we were truly lovers, we would be incensed if someone offered an account of the loved person which resolved all the mysteries about him."

I have to disagree. I never become incensed by the bonehead Darwinians and their insane reductionism. I just laugh at them. At least for now. But if they should ever prevail in their truly genocidal mission to obliterate the human station, that would probably be enough to tick me off.