Plumbing the Depths of the Cosmos with the Sacred Pipe

Peeking up where we leapt off yesterday, it is now Day Two and Miracle Six. What's on the divine agenda? Oh, not much, just a little vertical plumbing job. Rig up a starry firmament to divide the waters above from the waters below. Call the firmament heaven. Knock off early. Sounds good.

Twoday is the day of verticality. Initially there is only chaos, so the first order of business is the business of order, i.e., creating a little light with which to Work. Can't do anything without the old photons.

But there is "seeing" and there is "vision." The good vibrations of natural light allow us to see horizontally, but that isn't what makes us human.

Rather, what truly distinguishes us from the beasts and the tenured is the supernatural vision made possible by virtue of the verticality of the cosmos. Wisdom and sanctity, intellection and gnosis, only exist because they represent human modalities that are adequations to the reality of the vertical.

Only because of the vertical is Truth liberating; note also that lib-erty and genuine lib-eralism are impossible outside the vertical; in short, the horizontal cannot set one free: Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Cor 3:17).

To turn it around, in the absence of verticality -- waters above and waters below -- wisdom and sanctity are impossible, which is soph-evident by virtue of our cardiomyopic looniversities, where there is a cornucrapia of intelligent proglodytes who don't know the difference between boys and girls, much less God and man.

Now, in the Creator's plumbing job, heaven is the nexus, or connecting link, between the upper and lower waters. Water is a reflective medium, so let us imagine that there is a "double reflection" of heaven in the waters above and below.

Above is the realm of ideas, while below is the realm of material things. As Tomberg points out, knowledge involves "the process of relating the real to the ideal corresponding to it." To under-stand is bring into relation "the reflection above, the ideal, with the reflection below, the real." This is another way of saying that the light of the logos is reflected in both directions as "ideas" and "realities"; or it is reflected in us as substance and intellection.

Science is a deeply mystical enterprise, for it presumes the absolute unity of existence, a unity that is mirrored in the mind capable of reliably apprehending that unity (there is no universe for animals, only the narrow environment to which they are adapted). Because there is a uni-verse, there are uni-versal truths, which is to say axial truth around which the intellect turns (a uni-verse is one turn).

Obviously, if the universe were not a true universe, but a relativistic multiverse with no underlying unity, then truth would be strictly impossible, nor could man be the cosmic truth-bearer, for that matter. So truth is ultimately guaranteed by the One without which neither science nor scientist could be. Indeed, not even being could be without the one who Is (or AM, to be precise: no AM, no IS).

Belmont Club discusses "post-normal science" (HT: Alan), but it might be more straightforward to simply call it "abnormal" and therefore pathological science, a cognitive disease that pervades the leftist looniversity bin. The pathological science of the left always tries to change the world prior to understanding it, which is why left wing thinkers are political activists and change chumps prior to being scholars (cf. Paul Krugman).

The left loves science, but only so long as it is in accord with their policy preferences. If science proves that a fetus is a human being, then it is trumped by a woman's absolute right to determine the value of the embryo. This is why unseasonably warm weather always proves global warming, but freakishly cold weather is just statistical noise. Heads they win, tales we lose.

(Thanks to the left, an academy award is almost as big a joke as a Nobel Prize.)

Just as there is a moral inversion at the heart of leftism, there is a cognitive inversion as well (which there must be, since truth and virtue converge in the vertical). Their pathological epistemology is actually an inevitable consequence of their luciferian ontology, which denies the vertical at the outset -- and therefore the possibility of unity and truth. Instead of unity and truth, they substitute solidarity and commitment, which is to say exterior or "top-down" order and coercive action, for the lie is always coercive whereas the truth attracts and draws us to it.

Now in the sixth miracle recorded in John, Jesus restores sight to a man who had been blind from birth. But this is a rather special form of blindness, for it prevents the works of God from being revealed in him (John 9:3).

Jesus then makes a curious remark about the need to work while it is day -- since the night is coming, when it will be beer o'clock and no man can work -- but that "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."

The light of the world. Tomberg notes that the Logos "is not only the intelligence of the world, that is, the connection of the ideal with the real, but also the perception of the ideal and the real. For it is he who mirrors himself by way of ideas and by way of the facts of existence."

In other words, there is no knowledge, let alone truth, at the level of the senses, which in itself is sufficient to undermine any purely horizontal materialistic philosophy, including, of course, any and all forms of leftism. For once you "understand" materialism you have left materialism behind, for matter cannot understand anything.

Even the most bare act of understanding involves the union of the ideal and the real. Sensory experience does not interpret itself. In fact, only a severely autistic individual reduces the world to naked sensory impressions, and it would not be going too far to say that materialism itself is metaphysically autistic and therefore a priori incapable of "seeing the works of God."

The immanent logos -- i.e., the heavenly firmament reflected in the human intellect -- is that which confers our vertical orientation upon us, and allows us to be the reflecting medium -- the only one in all of creation -- capable of unifying the waters above (the ideal) and the waters below (the real).

Conversely, the absence (or rejection) of this logos is what makes leftist deconstructionists such fascinnoying textual deviates. These malign fantasists cannot reflect upon reality because they do not reflect the Real.

In John 9:6 the upper waters are provocatively represented by Jesus' saliva and the blending of it with earth (i.e., the infusion of the word into substance), with which he then anoints the blind man.

In our tradition of the guffaw-ha! experience, Raccoons are bobtized by the explosive "spittle on the computer screen" which makes Petey "present" to your most laughty self. For we take seriously the injunction to put on the new man (Col 3:10).