Don't Blink When God's Flash Bulb Goes Off

Unity involves the synthesis of contraries and the ordering of degrees of being. That being the case, it is precisely the opposite of the left's horizontalized approach to reality -- or rather, to denying it -- since they abhor hierarchy and obliterate differences, most notoriously, the differences between Man and Woman. This inevitably results in such misbegotten inventions as "homosexual marriage."

And I use the word "horizontalized" advisedly, because it would be a misunderstanding to call the leftist merely "horizontal," as if bad values and no values are synonymous.

Very few people are actually horizontal, generally only the brain-damaged, the severely retarded, the sociopathic, and Charles Johnson. Everyone else lives in vertical space, no matter how much they would like to deny it.

It reminds me of a bright fellow to whom Mizz E linked yesterday, who writes of free will and the overeducated knaves who pretend to deny what cannot be denied without affirming it:

"Unless a person’s faculties are truncated or injured by some tragedy, each and every one of us recognizes in himself an intelligent and free agent. Many people argue, in their personal flight from truth, that this recognition is an illusion, but nobody -- I repeat, nobody -- lives as if it is an illusion. We go right on analyzing our world, formulating goals and purposes, and directing ourselves to pursue them. What’s more, we perceive that we do this, and we reflect abstractly on our ability to do it, on what is required to do it well, and on how the process is working out. We human persons are supremely self-aware, and sometimes embarrassedly so.

"This is simply another way of saying that intellect and will are at the core of what we are. It is one of the fundamental things that we cannot not know."

Swish! What this ultimately means is that any form of doctrinaire leftism immediately and by its very nature sets itself over and against the deep structural patterns of reality, since its vulgar and horizontalized world view simply cannot account for any of the quintessential properties of our humanness -- properties which man attempts to recognize and sanctify through rituals that simultaneously turn us inward and open us to the transcendent. These are what we might call "flash bulb" moments of divine ingression. So don't blink!

These are decisive -- as in scission between the "old" and "new" man -- moments when the divine reality manifests in the clothing of time -- or the clothing becomes transparent to the unseen -- and that we need to acknowledge on pain of closing ourselves to the vertical reality that precedes and gives our lives structure, direction, and meaning (which are aspects of the same reality as manifested in space, time, and depth, respectively).

Man must "turn around to recognize how blind he is if he trusts only what he sees with his eyes" (Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity).

Or, in the words of Don Colacho, "To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which a poet sang." And to be extra-stupid is to believe it is possible for members of the same sex to take out a marriage license and imagine they will know the thing itself instead of a mere facsimile, a "pretend" version.

The bar mitzvah would represent an archetypal example. Boyhood is oriented -- or at least it should be -- to the ideal of responsible manhood, i.e., the post-biological categories -- or divine deputations -- of Husband and Father (either literally or figuratively).

But in a purely secular world, time has no qualities or properties that condition our existence. Rather, it is simply a "straight line" leading from nothing to nowhere.

Sure, we can make up conventions such as birthdays, anniversaries, baptisms, confirmations, and awards shows, but they are only human contrivances to make it seem like time isn't just a graveyard train hurtling us toward the tomb and that celebrities aren't just a bunch of selfish narcissists.

Religious forms are not intended to "invent" but to disclose and acknowledge reality. And in some sense, most of these forms revolve around birth and death -- or death and rebirth. Obviously a funeral has this explicit purpose in mind. Likewise circumcision, baptism, and communion.

But so too is marriage a funeral rite. It is the death of the mere "man" or "woman" and their rebirth as husband and wife, which only a fool would regard as somehow "equivalent" (equal yes, but hardly equivalent -- thank God!).

Now, one-to-a-customer man-woman marriage is obviously a Judeo-Christian ideal. However, unfortunately, so too is the destruction of this sacred institution. I say this because the unchurched mob that mindlessly clamors for the redefinition of its plain meaning are usually motivated by such fine Judeo-Christian liberal principles as tolerance, compassion, and fairness. It is "not fair" that two people of the same sex cannot get married. End of discussion.

This only goes to show that any virtue isolated from the others and removed from its properly organic hierarchy will eventually turn upon itself. As Don Colacho observes, and history confirms, "The devil can achieve nothing great without the careless collaboration of the virtues." And "The fool calls conclusions he does not understand 'prejudices.'"

With this sleight of unseen hands, the leftist places his sanctimoniass on the side of angels and has no obligation to engage with the bigots who beg to differ with him.

Ratzinger, in Salt of the Earth, notes that "law without a foundation in morality becomes injustice." Misguided leftists pretend they want to preserve a "wall of separation" between religion and government, but what they really mean is that they want to impose their materialistic value system on the rest of us, and that our traditional Judeo-Christian value system somehow violates a Constitution that the left otherwise doesn't take seriously anyway: you know, "the Constitution has no fixed meaning, and you're violating it!"

What are the values that animate the left's desire to impose "homosexual marriage?" Obviously the values cannot have a transcendent or objective source. Therefore they are immanent only, invented by man and rooted in his shifting sensibilities.

For the leftist, this ultimately means that in order to distinguish wrong from right -- or this action from that -- he consults his feelings. It feels good -- even superior! -- to permit people of the same sex to marry, and what kind of assoul wants to make people feel bad?

Again, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, time is not linear, but nor is it circular, as it is for pagans and other Nietzsche brothers living in Bongo Congo. And it certainly isn't determined, as "revealed" by the dreary gods of Islam and scientism. Rather, it is a spiral-bound bewilderness adventure.

As Ratzinger notes in Spirit of the Liturgy, this is "the great movement of the cosmos."

Thus, "Our existence is a kind of fractal of the whole," in that "the small circles of the lives of individuals are inscribed within the one great circle of history as it moves from exitus to reditus. The small circles carry within themselves the great rhythm of the whole, give it concrete forms that are ever new, and so provide it with the force of movement."

This is why, in the book, we symbolize it as ʘ (the dot in the middle is a fractal of the whOle) nestled in the spiraling trinitarian energies of (↓↑). ("So to say," it should otherwise go without saying at all.)

Ratzinger continues: "The two -- the great circle and the small circles -- are interconnected" in such a way that "worship is bound up with all three dimensions of the cross-shaped movement: the personal, the social, and the universal."

But critically, what distinguishes the Judeo-Christian understanding from, say, Plotinus, is that the initial "exitus" is not some kind of mistake or necessary prolongation of the One, but rather, a positive and free act of creation. It is a gift, not a curse.

And man's troubled predicament in this annoying "vortex of finitude" is not intrinsic to our nature, but a fall from it. It doesn't have to be this way, since nothing can negate our freedom. It is wounded, yes, but not killed.

Not yet, anyway.