Truth, Mystery, Language, and Interiority

HvB notes that everything in the cosmos necessarily points to the Creator, while simultaneously pointing back to its own non-necessity, or contingency. We didn't have to be, while God cannot not be.

To put it another way, creatures cannot help but to speak of God, whereas God didn't necessarily have to speak us. Rather, he could have only created man in freedom, just as we can only return the love in freedom -- which is ultimately derived from the very unnarcissary freedom in which we were created, or it isn't love.

But in knowing this, we come up against a horizon of unknowablility. In other words, we can posit a vague kind of deistic or demiurgic activity in the cosmos without knowing a thing about the interior life of God. In order to gain insight into that, it will require a positive act on the part of the Creator, a desire and willingness to be known -- indeed, just like any other "person." Persons are always veiled by an irreducible penumbra of mystery that cannot be penetrated, only voluntarily opened. And even then, to open oneself to the other is to share the essence of the mystery, not to eliminate it.

(This, I think, speaks to the horror of real torture, in which the sacred mystery of the other is violated; it most definitely does not speak to the waterboarding of a KSM, who would cynically use our Christian scruples as a shield to hide his demonic essence. His defense is hardly the sacred mystery of being, but the bottomless credulousness of the useful idiots of the left. Those leftists who are kind to the cruel are inevitably cruel to the kind, as Taranto demonstrates.)

Coincidentally, this is Easter week, in which it is said that God revealed his inner being and shared it with human beings in the most intimate possible way. Naturally, -- again, just as in any other person -- to reveal oneself to the other requires vulnerability, and it requires great strength to be so vulnerable; one is, as it were, delivering oneself into the hands of the other, in the "faith" that the other will not abuse the privilege. Thus, this assumes a kind of prior intimacy that will only deepen as a result of the shared intimacy.

But God, of course, never does things halfway, but always goes the whole hog. In the Passion, it is as if God reveals his essence to everyone, worthy and unworthy alike (although I suppose the point is that no one is really worthy of such an infinite sacrifice), to do with it what they will.

That many respond with violence and sadism pretty much tells you all you need to know about man. The pattern is repeated every time we do violence to truth, to beauty, to innocence. Imagine opening yourself up to mankind at large! It is the main reason I prefer anonymity. Just one barbarous troll is enough. Imagine millions. Imagine millions of people taking the truth into their teeth and violently shaking it like a dog in order to subdue it and make it edible on their terms.

The same sort of beast wishes for God to reveal himself like... I don't know, like a kind of religious pornography that also does violence to the mystery of being. As we have said before, pornography is any activity that does this, which is why we would say, for example, that metaphysical Darwinism is truly scientific porn, just as, say, Scientology or Deepak Chopra represent spiritual porn. In "demystifying," they actually attack the sacred mystery at the heart of God's being.

As Balthasar explains, the higher something is situated on the ladder of being, the more it is "surrounded by a protective veil that withdraws them, like something sacred, from the grasping hands of the profane. Only a mind without feeling for nobility and its need for protection will complain of this hiddenness."

God can only be approached with open hand, not with the greedy and grasping hands of a scientistic cretin. It is not that God has not revealed himself to Bill Maher; to the contrary, it is that Bill Maher has concealed himself from God in his own sanctuary of malignantly self-sufficient narcissism. He only sees a God who is as bitterly self-enclosed as he is, but for that reason, neither party really exists. Rather, that God is as dead as Maher. Maher is a figment in the imagination of his non-existent God.

Such postmodern barbarians "confuse hiddenness with a deficient rationality or brand with irrationality all those objects that are not accessible to the anonymous, public knowledge of the man on the street." The point is that All truth is rational, but not every intelligence is competent to know every truth (HvB). On this blog we obviously share the most intimate secrets, and we can all see what the unredeemed man does with them. What they do with them has no effect upon us, but only results in their own further auto-desecration and spiritual beclowning.

Which is a fascinating thing about Truth, is it not? Truly it is a sword that cuts both ways, giving Life to one man and Death to another (and vice versa). Returning to the Passion, was this not a meta-cosmic event that cut through the very heart of history like a great sword? That was a rhetorical question, bearing in mind that the wound that cuts through history runs straight through our own heart, just as the San Andreas fault runs directly below the Slackatoreum. In short, it's my fault, and I know it.

Mystery and interiority are virtually synonymous. Where one intuits mystery, one is also perceiving interiority. Again, mystery is not to be confused with "ignorance," but is a positive mode that points to an essence that can never be seen or touched. Rather, it is like a kind of "radiant darkness" at the heart of all things. But it is also coterminous with delight, is it not? For imagine living in a world in which nothing was protected by this veil of secrecy. Again, this would be a pornographic world, like a giant liberal university campus.

But in reality, because of the mystery of interiority, "there are no naked facts." If there were naked facts, they would have no significance whatsoever, because they would have no relation to the greater mystery of things. Nevertheless, it is this kind of detached facticity that seduces the scientistic or atheistic bonehead. This is none other than Sophia's ugly sister, Agnes, who will "give it up" for anyone -- Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Queeg, Mtraven, you name it. Personally, I wouldn't touch Agnes with a ten foot pole, knowing who's been there.

Here we cannot overlook that mystery of mysteries, language, for language, or the word, is the lifeline suspended between subjects and those who would know them. Thus, at one end, language is always plugged directly into the mystery of being.

But at the same time, it's like an extension cord that can get so far from the source that there's almost no power at the other end -- no "electricity," no "juice," no "zap." You will have noticed that the language of the secular left is entirely of this nature. It couldn't compete with a firefly, for it is plugged into the wrong end. This is the real reason why newspapers will die. There are almost no mainstream journalists who are plugged into the source. Rather, like all fallen men, their source is "the world."

And that is not all. When being is deprived of its mystery and interiority, it also loses its value, its "lovability." In reality, this attitude is a result of boredom, cynicism, and saturation. Ultimately it is the projection of one's own dead and saturated self into the world (there is a reason why our trolls are so boring, but also fascinated by the "life" of this site). Again: knowledge and mystery are not polar opposites, but functions of one another: "Truth is the unveiling of being," but there is always more to unveil.

Existence is surely not a "fact." Rather, it is nothing if not a mystery, and the more we know, the more the mystery deepens. I am the same person I was yesterday. Only more mysterious. Or, to zimmarize, you could say that I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

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More of the sane.