Catch a Falling Man

I believe we were discussing man's sufficient reason, i.e., why we are here. This reason needs to be proportionate to the phenomenon, and although natural selection is sufficient to explain some aspects of man, if pushed too far, it quickly becomes absurd and ultimately self-refuting.

Again, in taking a moderate, realistic, open-minded, and non-dogmatic stance, we must battle illiterates at both extremes, whereas those two extremes only have each other to hector and harass (i.e., William and his literalist demons). So our job is more difficult, in that we must wage a two-front war against two types of illiteracy.

Or, looked at vertically, we could say that the Williams of the world -- the transmitters and enforcers of cultural convention -- always have a two front war, in which anyone who doesn't stick to their narrow map is persecuted, punished, or marginalized, irrespective of whether they are above or below.

For example, consider the utter contempt with which the left treats a black person who matures beyond leftist dependency or a woman who has no need of feminist paranoia and bitterness, to say nothing of a homosexual who doesn't define himself by his sexuality, and who therefore has a sense of proportion (and of propriety). Since they threaten the entire liberal fantasy, they must be either ignored or attacked, starved or suffocated.

Think of all the brilliant bloggers out there, and compare them to the best and brightest of the liberal media. If you could combine the depth of Tom Friedman with the anger of Paul Krugman and the inanity of Maureen Dowd, you'd have the perfect liberal.

Come to think of it, in my entire life I don't recall encountering a deep or serious discussion of religion in school or in the MSM, which is quite an indictment.

For this represents a rejection of depth itself, with catastrophic consequences, because, as alluded to above, we end up with shrill and shallow anti-religious bigots of William's intellectual caliber against shrill and shallow specimens of, say, Pat Robertson's pedigree. No wonder they hate each other. They certainly deserve each other.

Now, a human being testifies to no less than three miracles: of intelligence, of free will, and of love.

The sufficient reason for intelligence must be truth, while the sufficient reason for our freedom must be goodness itself, hence our ability to distinguish good from evil in the dimension of virtue. And the sufficient reason of love must be beauty itself, hence the love of all things beautiful, both objective and subjective.

Or, to turn it around, human intelligence is "absolutely meaningless" (if such a thing may be conceived) in the absence of the Absolute, just as our freedom is absurd in the absence of a transfinite end, and love deprived of truth and beauty becomes demonic.

Hitler no doubt "loved," but what did he love? Surely not beauty or decency, let alone truth. As such, he was lovelessness personified, just as the person who embodies intelligence and virtue is the sage and/or saint, which is to say, the apex of humanness.

As usual, Schuon expresses it in an extremely compact manner that is both intellectual and practical: "the sufficient reason for human intelligence" must be "knowledge of the Sovereign Good, and in consequence all that refers to it directly or indirectly"; for free will it must be "the choice of the Sovereign Good and in consequence the practice of all that leads to it"; and for human love, "love of the Sovereign Good and all that attests to it."

Which is why we are to love God with all our mind (as intelligence loves truth), with all our strength (as the will loves virtue), and all our heart (as the soul loves beauty).

No one but One accomplishes this "perfectly," which is to say, integrally, but our own integration and actualization depend upon it; in other words, we are to simultaneously become what we are and all we are. Only man has the great privilege of failing to accomplish this, since other animals "are what they are," and nothing else. Which is why all men are in need of mercy.

In short, man is duty-bound to surpass himself, but clearly, on pain of absurdity, this is something that no man can do unaided. For in the absence of God, a man is just a man, if that! Cows don't fail to "measure up," any more than William does. He is what he is, and no man can save him.

Or, he has already saved himself, and thus condemned himself to the two-dimensional paradise of the human bovine, where there is plenty of grass and one doesn't notice the fences. In any event, failure to surpass oneself is to sink beneath oneself.

In reality, just as man's intelligence testifies to metacosmic intelligence as such, our own undeniable transcendence testifies to the Transcendent, i.e., the Sovereign Good.

Thus, we can only transcend ourselves by virtue of God's prior "pouring out" of himself, which is grace. You might say that grace searches for man until a man catches it.