The Post of Christmas Past

Since I don't have time for a new post, plus I want to allow some omerging ideas to marinate awhile before I pop off about them, I've descended down into the hull of the arkive to dredge up some old Christmas postings. I haven't yet read them, but I'm assuming they'll be up to standards. As always, I will edit them as I go along, so they are substantially different:

At Christmas we mamaryalize not just the birth of the celestial Word in the terrestrial flesh -- or the vertical I-ambryo in the horizontal voidgin -- but the eternal conception in our own mamamatrix, or womb with a pew, where these two irreconcilable realities somehow become one. It is that little cocʘʘn where the worm turns and goes from crawling to beautiflying.

In short: no conception, no birth, especially again. But birth obviously isn't the end of it. Or, like all births, it is the end of one mode and the dawn of another; every birth conceals a death, and vice versa. Where there's a wake there's awakening. Fin. Again!

Also, many exigencies and habits can prevent conception and/or terminate pregnancy, including such spiritually Ønanistic practices as materialism (it really does cause blandness!) or the various abortofascisms and mourning after bills of the left.

Such verbicidal techniques either prevent the union of Word and flesh, or assure a celestial abortion once it has taken place. For many people, spiritual conception is a disaster, as it would totally interfere with their preferred manner of living, i.e., their wholly narcissism.

Christmas wasn't celebrated -- at least by Christians -- for the first 400 years or so of Christianity's existence. One way or another, it grafted itself onto pre-Christian celebrations of the winter solstice, which marks the moment when the world arrests its descent into cosmic darkness and imperceptibly moves toward a new life of spring in its step.

But this hardly makes the essential cerebration any less Christian. Rather, it simply makes Christianity the most adequate expression of permanent truths that have always been intuited. As Warren mentioned in a comment the other year,

"Basically, everybody more or less knows this stuff. It's the wisdom and experience of the entire human race speaking here. The only people who claim to deny it are a few little fringe modernist groups (materialists, certain fundie Protestant sects, etc.).

"In fact, this is a big reason why some fundie Protestants view Catholics as 'pagans.' In a way, they're quite correct, because the Catholic tradition includes much wisdom from the pagan world, while trimming away (ideally) the false and/or devilish elements in it. Rejecting the entire pagan worldview, as certain Christians do, is to needlessly throw out a large chunk of the human race's traditional wisdom, thereby making oneself much more clueless than is strictly necessary."

This is absolutely true. Most of the things we call heresies are not so much flat out wrong, but involve doctrines taken out of the context of total truth, and then either over- or underemphasized.

Raccoon emeritus Meister Eckhart agrees with this view, in that "throughout his life, [he] championed the... position that philosophy and theology did not contradict each other and that philosophy was a necessary tool for Christian theology."

The rank-and-foul try to derive metaphysical truth solely from phenomena and/or history, but in reality, what we call "salvation history" involves the serial instantiation of certain meta-cosmic principles (which is why it is living truth).

Furthermore, the Creator is a person. Thus, he has principles. But unlike leftists, his principles are not just fig leaves to obscure or lend legitimacy to what he really wants to do to you and your wallet.

Here is how Eckhart put it: "What philosophers have written about the nature and properties of things agrees with [the Bible], especially since everything that is true, whether in being or in knowing, in scripture or in nature, proceeds from one source and one root of truth."

Thus, philosophy, science, theology and revelation all "teach the same thing, differing only in the way they teach, namely as worthy of belief, as probable and likely, and as truth."

Remember, although Jesus is "Word made flesh," this does not mean that the Word was nowhere to be found in this vale of tears prior to the Incarnation. Rather, I would say (with Augustine) that the Word and Wisdom of the Christic principle were (and are) always here, and couldn't not be here; again, where there is truth there is God.

Eckhart's whole project was guided by an interior conviction "about the conformity between reason and revelation, philosophy and theology." The Meistrʘ -- who often used paradox to convey truth -- expressed it thus: "It does not so much seem to me that God understands because he exists, but rather that he exists because he understands."

Do you see the point? Surely, understanding must be anterior to existence, to such an extent that to understand is to exist (I mean, someone had to have understood all those finely tuned mathematical equations that govern the big bang; surely we can't have been the first).

Naked existence itself is neither here nor there nor anywhere, really. Thus, God is first and foremost "the negation of negation," or perhaps the negation of invincible cosmic stupidity.

I would go so lo as to see that the affirmation of anything is the affirmation of God, and therefore the negation of "nothing" (nothing being the absurd affirmation of a blind nihilism that can affirm nothing). Otherwise there is no ground for any affirmations at all.

If God exists because he understands, it means that trolls who don't understand these truths don't even properly exist. Or, alternatively, they only exist. And existence without Truth is.... well, first of all it's an absurdity, but more to the point, it is hell.

For to know that one is an idiot is to at least know a genuine truth, and thus nurture a conception that may eventually come to full term in the light of deity.

(All of the above quotes are taken from Bernard McGinn's The Harvest of Mysticism.)