Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Don't Look a Gift Cosmos in the Mouth

In these intellectually desiccated times, it is nearly impossible to speak of the natural -- or supernaturally natural -- relationship between love and truth, or reverence and knowledge, except to a scattered remnant of bOhemian neotraditional retrofuturists.

But that hardly makes the relationship any less real, for it can only be sundered by death of one of the principles. In other words, like its terrestrial analogue, the union of Mr. Truth and Mrs. Love -- or absolute and infinite, in a manner of speaking -- shall last until death do they part.

Now, husband and wife only come into being upon the new condition of marriage. What was a man now becomes a husband, even though it is the same man. And man-woman is not the same as husband-wife, any more than consecrated bread is mere bread.

Likewise, truth-love is not the same as truth and/or love alone. For example, what is a love based on lies? Is it really love when we love an illusion? Or is that just narcissism by proxy?

And is it possible for a person who hates the world -- and his life along with it (which amount to the same thing) -- to know the truth of things? Or does hatred and bitterness exile one from reality?

Can someone who hates America -- say, Noam Chomsky -- really understand anything about it? What about (presumably) less extreme haters, such as our current president? As his bitter half said, ours is a country that is "just downright mean" and "guided by fear."

Really? I won't argue the point. What is more interesting is that this is no doubt how she truly perceives things, because this is who she is: narrow, bigoted, ungrateful, and more than a little thick. So thick that one laments the unfairness of a system that eases such a defective intellect through its most elite universities, just so liberals-of-palor can feel good about themselves. But it is not good to feel good about a lie, since this implicitly sunders the above-noted relationship between love and truth.

I can't help contrasting this with Chesterton, whose spiritual biography I just read. Whatever else he was, this was a Happy Man in love with the world.

Conversely, the ranks of the left are filled with unhappy people who detest the world and want to change it into something it isn't -- and man into something he can never be. The conundrum for the leftist is how to hate the world "enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing" (Chesterton).

You cannot simultaneously love this country and want to "fundamentally transform" it, as Obama promised. If you don't believe me, try saying it to your wife, and see how it goes over: "honey, I love you. But I sure wish you were someone else."

The most perfect system dreamt up by the left cannot redeem man, first, because it will have been dreamt up by a man, and second, because any system that requires perfect people in order to function is doomed to failure. In contrast, our wise founders devised a political system based upon man as we actually find him, not as we wish him to be. This is appropriate skepticism, in contrast to the ubiquitous combination of cynicism and gullibility found in the left.

The reason we divide state power is to prevent anyone from acquiring it undiluted. Not for nothing do liberal fascists such as Obama or Thomas Friedman envy the freedom of the Chinese autocrat to do as he pleases.

Chesterton's gratitude extended not just to his nation, but to all of creation: "You should not look a gift universe in the mouth." Yes, you -- you who "criticize the cosmos / And borrow a skull and a tongue to do it with"!

And you, who superciliously vilify the nation that has beclowned your head with worthless but remunerative degrees from Princeton and Harvard to lend an egregious prestige to your screeching impeachment!

Way before he was a Christian, Chesterton was in love with the world, with "the tremendous Everything that is anywhere." Two things one can say about this: yes, he was a Christian, he just didn't know it; or, this attitude is precisely why he was attracted to a world view that reflected his view of the world:

"The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world -- it had evidently been meant to go there -- and then a strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts... had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with eerie exactitude.... Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine."

Isn't that a perfect description of the Way It Is? Or do I speak only for myphilo and itsoph?

Here is another subtle point raised by Chesterton: none of us, when we assent to a "theory of life," do so because it has been "proven" to us with mere logic. That's just not the way the world works. For example, no one accepts natural selection because he has personally examined all the empirical evidence and concluded that the theory is true.

Rather, such a person -- myself included -- provisionally accepts the general theory because it does a good job of tying a lot of disparate phenomena together and making sense of things. But do I therefore accept it as a universal law that explains everything about life -- and more to the point, about human existence? Of course not. Only a terribly cramped soul could ever do that.

It is the same with a theology. Like Chesterton, I never accepted religion and then deployed it as a kind of cognitive grid to superimpose upon reality. Rather, I simply had experiences and insights that were not only mirrored in Christian tradition (surprising enough); but then that tradition provided an even deeper and richer framework to organize the phenomena (which it also generated more of).

As Chesterton notes, "A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a lock and a key are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key."

Chesterton wrote about these matters in such a congenial and informal way, that it is easy to not take him seriously. But that is exactly how it is: I first discovered this interior horizon of contours, of dimensions, of lights and shadows; and then I stumbled upon this key -- that obviously pre-existed me and my so-called discoveries -- that corresponds perfectly to the lock. How freaky is that!

So you cannot "prove" Christianity in the usual way; it cannot be illuminated from the outside, because it illuminates everything else, from the inside out.

And of course, we do not mean to exclude our Jewish friends, who have no doubt had an analogous experience (as I too have had, having a foot, or at least several toes, in that camp).

Better stop now... to be continued...

63 comments:

Rick said...

As a Christian recognizing how Christ came to fulfill the Law, how can I say I am not also Jewish? If the NT grows (stands, rests, relies) much on its OT roots, that's good enough for me.

Rick said...

Btw, Bob, how is the David Stove book? Better than Berlinski's?

Gagdad Bob said...

I was planning on starting it today, having knocked off Chesterton yesterday. Seems like more of a fun than necessary read, but I'll mention it if it is worth the time.

Cond0011 said...

"The reason we divide state power is to prevent anyone from acquiring it undiluted. "

Yes. Spiritual integrity can only go so far before the upper (and more rareified) atmoshpere of pure unadulterated power morally deforms even the most hobbit-like character.

"Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine."

Whoa...

Tony said...

Reading Chesterton in the library during graduate school kept the raccoon in me alive. It was a riot: after hours of work-reading the cramped, childless, hyperfocused and over-wrought, I'd read Chesterton, and it was like watching someone really alive in the world. He wrote for the ILN, IIRC, so the words came out in a torrent. _Orthodoxy_ is a bare fraction of his writing. His prodigious ability in writing was matched only by his girth.

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

Yes, of the great Christian writers of the 20th, Chesterton was the best actual writer - in terms of his use of words and the energy of the English language specifically and language in general. While both Tolkien and Lewis wrote more significant works individually, for both of them the integrity of their work is more a balance of forces; for Chesterton it has a Don Juan cavalier and sheer abundance to it.

I keep telling people to read Manalive. What a fun book full of love, humor and violence it is.

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

Also, check this oot: The End of The Alternative Media

julie said...

And man-woman is not the same as husband-wife, any more than consecrated bread is mere bread.

Indeed; I suspect that is why couples who shack up without getting married are so much more likely to break up.

mushroom said...

I absolute second River on Manalive. It is an inspired work. It could also be the reason I still prefer revolvers to autoloaders.

Gagdad Bob said...

Rick: the Stove book is a tad polemical and repetitive. Might have been better to just furnish a list of bullet points. The author also isn't as witty as he seems to imagine himself to be.

Gagdad Bob said...

Also, I'm not too crazy about the idea of demolishing Darwinism but being equally cynical about every conceivable alternative. Comes across as cranky.

julie said...

Sounds as though he illustrates the point of today's post, in a way. If he's not in love with creation, what exactly does he love?

Rick said...

Thanks, Bob.

This is good, if you haven't seen it. About 40 minutes long:

David Berlinski—Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions - Interview / Hoover Institute / Uncommon Knowledge

Christina M said...

Mr. Chesterton was the most joyful man I had ever encountered. I cried when I read the last paragraph of "Orthodoxy," and told myself I wanted what he had. Within the year I had returned to Catholicism.

I'm now enjoying "Experiments Against Reality." I've met two authors, so far, that I had never heard of, that I would like to check out: Muriel Sparks and Robert Musil.

ge said...

"ON EDUCATION SWING IN 'OIHO,' OBAMA MISSPELLS BATTLEGROUND STATE..."

well Muslims do read from right to left

Mizz E said...

“I believe that much of Western culture today is deep in the grip of the sort of distracted pantheism Kierkegaard diagnosed and Chesterton battled against. We are, as T.S. Eliot put it in another context, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” The remedy, the antidote, to the corrosive boredom that follows in its wake is precisely to cultivate that true attention to the panoply of existence, to see, as William Blake put it, the world in a grain of sand. Chesterton is an accurate guide, an inspiring teacher, in this school of wonderment. We need him more now than ever.”

Roger Kimball
From an interview with author Roger Kimball about his new book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/1509/despotism_distraction_and_the_defense_of_civilization.aspx

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Excellent post and comments!

I heartedly cooncur, once truth n' love are severed, they become deformed and distorted.

Divide and conquer seems to be the strategy of the left on all fronts.
How can it not devolve into fascism?

Gagdad Bob said...

Too late for a post today. And tomorrow I have to leave early for work, so that post won't be born either unless I induce labor or perform an early morning emergency c-section.

More generally, school starts on Sept. 6, and that's definitely going to upset my rutine.

Cond0011 said...

*sigh* I'm so sad.

http://www.aaps.k12.mi.us/reced.greencamp/files/lake_erie_raccoon.jpg

Empty trash can...

Christina M said...

Thanks for that quote and link, Mizz E.

julie said...

that post won't be born either unless I induce labor or perform an early morning emergency c-section.

Heh. I know that feeling...

Van Harvey said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Van Harvey said...

"Likewise, truth-love is not the same as truth and/or love alone. For example, what is a love based on lies? Is it really love when we love an illusion? Or is that just narcissism by proxy?"

I wonder if there might be more to this... by way of less. Are Truth and Love separate, or different properties or states, of the same? Along the lines of 'Truth is what IS, Love is the meaning of what is, in action'?

Which puts Lies and Narcissim in a depressing and pitiable light. Lies are what is not, and Narcissim the appearance of nothingness in action. A nothingness that exists only as a denial of what IS.

How horrible.

And to have become that... the horror.

Cond0011 said...

"For example, what is a love based on lies?"

The Union of a Caretaker and a Narcissist: Two sides of the same coin as they enable each other into self conflagration (and the inevitable immolation of the caretaker). A fine example of a toxic hip in socket relationship.

Terrible to behold.

Tony said...

Love only occurs between realities. Hiddenness and deceit raises a veil and prevents love entirely.

In my experience, people tend to love others in the way they wish themselves to be loved. For example, a person who cares for another with continual acts of service is implicitly saying that he or she wishes to be loved the way.

This may not be the way the beloved most feels loved. Instead of acts of service, it could be touch, inquiry, invitation to spontaneous activity, etc.

It's important to read your beloved, not only for what it tells you about them, but what it may tell you about yourself.

Then the loving becomes better informed, and more deeply mutual.

.02

Mizz E said...

Magister, A good observation and one that meshes well with my own hard won lessons.
I recently had the opportunity to share some wisdom I've collected over the years with a friend who was feeling bereft at the departure of one he had considered a friend. Here's part of what I shared--it comes primarily from the works of Canadian author, Merle Shain (1935-1989).

"We are all essentially alone, and sometimes the people whom you love can make it through, and sometimes they can't get to you no matter how much they try. And it is also true that friends, even the very best, have a cut-off point, a point at which they have to beg off to protect themselves--even if it means that they save themselves at the expense of you.

I wish I could claim that all the people whom I've loved have always loved me back, or that my needs and those of the people closest to me have always dovetailed perfectly. But friendship doesn't work that way, and people's needs aren't always the same, so it is only fair to say that I have often wished for something no one had to give, and in that I know I'm not alone.

Some people feel angry when they think of moments when they've had to stand alone, and question the value they once put upon friends who weren't there when they needed them. But I think the thing to remember is this--you don't get from friends what you give to them, you get what they have to give, and that is the thing you must not forget. People can only give you what they have to give.

It is difficult to remember this when you know just what you need and none of your friends have it to give, and especially difficult when you have given it to them in the past. But you will save yourself a lot of grief if you keep in mind that you don't have you for a friend, however much you might wish you did. You have that person out there instead.

Perhaps you will take chicken soup to a friend who is sick, and they will forget your birthday just the same. Or maybe you will have them to your parties and they will give none to which you might be asked. But maybe they will hand you a piece of truth one day, in a sentence tossed off with a sidelong glance, and if it's something you couldn't have found within yourself, you will have been repaid in full.

It helps to bear in mind, if somebody is particularly sensitive and understands everything you feel, you might have to hold their hand a lot when the world does them in. And if you know a take-charge person whom you can surrender your life to when it gets too much for you, you are likely to find yourself having trouble wrenching it back again after they are through."
###

More to the point you stated though, I'm fond of this very short story from Alan Cohen that I posted on my previous Tumblr. (Current Tumbler here :) -Mizz E

Anonymous said...

LOVE this blog.... Chesterton found music in paradox, and joy in spirit, and this blog gives me a sane kind of beat to think and dance to so thanks again....

Tony said...

As always, thank you Mizz E.

I think the thing to remember is this--you don't get from friends what you give to them, you get what they have to give, and that is the thing you must not forget. People can only give you what they have to give.

And recognizing that fact is a crucial part of charity/caritas, which can only be such if it's grounded in such a reality.

Speaking of reality, Niall Ferguson's clue bat was swung with expert force at the Obama administration. His article in Newsweek and the ensuing surgery he performed on his putative critics was relishing to behold.

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

Ferguson is doing a great job of being a tarbaby. He seems to enjoy the role; almost too much. On the one hand, it's obvious that his article was intended to bring out a certain level of reaction from the Left, and he is fanning the flames higher. But on the other hand, it does seem like he was careful in his arguments to base them on fact, rather than THEORY (though theory does come in when interpreting the facts) and the normal commentators are reduced to sentimental reactions.

I can just see Niall smirking in his pic. Politics, what a spectacle and a circus.

Jack said...

Fake Republican War on Women? Or very real Liberal War on Men?

Men, Who Needs Them?

Could one say such things about any other group of people?

Gagdad Bob said...

And women only want to hook up with men anyway. They want a permanent bond with the state.

Gagdad Bob said...

Jack: that NYT piece is just about the most shockingly perverse sample of tenurethink I've encountered in awhile. It's sickening, really. For example,

"Over the next nine months, you stole minerals from your mother’s bones and oxygen from her blood"

It has never occurred to us that our child has been stealing the things we've been giving.

To quote Kimball, "when someone tells you the moon is made of green cheese, you don't argue about it, you just put the chap down as a crackpot and move on." Nor do you refute an illness. You resist it.

Gagdad Bob said...

Shows once again how so-called secular humanism is really subhumanism.

Jack said...

GB-

I have to admit that the article invoked a very strong physical response from me as well. Typically, progressivist group-think idiocy merely elicits an eye roll or at worst a wearied groan. This is something else entirely.

My fear is that this is a reflection of a viewpoint that is becoming closer to being a norm (if not *the* norm) on the left. Would it be paranoid to wonder how long it will be before this view is explicitly taught in public schools? The article itself, written, it would appear, by a college professor, indicates it is already well-ensconced in our universities. Yet that was probably largely true at least 20 years ago when I went to college.

So why do I still find it so surprising?

Gagdad Bob said...

It's surprising because you aren't the frog inside that slowly boiling water. When you are suddenly dropped in, it scalds. Kind of like what holy water does to Regan in The Exorcist, only in reverse.

Jack said...

I'm not sure the article even makes sense from a biological viewpoint. Correct me if I am wrong here. The author claims that "I" was in my mother when she was in my grandmother's womb. This is false. Whatever was "in" my mother while in my grandmother did not, for example have my DNA. My DNA was created with the coming together of egg AND sperm i.e. two gametes creating a zygote. The zygote stage would be the first instance where there existed any being that had my unique DNA--but not before.

His seems to be an extremely tendentious reading of biology, to put it mildly. He fallaciously rules out the father by his own faulty version of human reproduction. This from a professor of biology.

No wonder the left is so confused about abortion.

But you are right one cannot refute this illness, only resist it. That said, I sometimes despair whether or not our culture and civilization can survive this kind of stupidity.

Gagdad Bob said...

The idea that there can be humanness without fatherhood is not even nonsense. In my opinion, the two co-arise. Motherhood is a biological category. Fatherhood is the first cultural -- and therefore human -- category.

Gagdad Bob said...

There is simply no way mothers and helpless infants could have survived without a committed male in the picture. To deny the latter is to regress, not progress.

Gagdad Bob said...

Note as well how it is a regression from fruitful trinity to pernicious duality.

Jack said...

Your diagnosis is correct, methinks. I have been reading a bit of James V. Schall lately. Both "The Order of Things" and currently "Another Sort of Learning". To go so quickly from the depths of lucidity and the reverence for truth found in the writing of Schall to this foul dreck has proven to be quite a shock to the system. But enough, or I will get myself worked up again. Back to Schall!

Gagdad Bob said...

Anyone who claims to be unable to discern the difference between an author who sheds Light and one who sheds Darkness is in a pre-human state of being.

Jack said...

Denying fathers can only hasten the arrival of the total welfare state. This is apparently something to be desired by a large percentage of single females (amongst others, of course). The "hubby state" as one writer recently called it. It seems that this loyal Democrat voting bloc wants what could be described as "dependent autonomy" i.e. "I want to do whatever I want, and I want someone else to pay for it." Witness Sandra Fluke, to cite an obvious example. It is clear that this is a contradiction in terms. Though when has *that* ever stopped them before.

Gagdad Bob said...

Single females are one of the biggest voting blocs of the left, along with female men, i.e., the new castrati.

Jack said...

The article on women wanting merely to engage in meaningless sex seems spot-on. Reminds of the time I was telling a liberal (male) friend that I thought that though the hookup culture hurt both men and women, it hurt women more. He responded by stating that my position was "20th Century view" on the matter. This alone was meant to refute what I had said.

Apparently, I never got the memo that human nature fundamentally changed on January 1st, in the year 2000. Certainly he was implying that any view from the past, even if that of merely 13 years ago, is by definition, illegitimate.

We don't talk much anymore.

Gagdad Bob said...

Turning women into men hardly liberates women. Rather, it diminishes and imprisons them in a false reality.

Imagine a "men's liberation movement" that turned men into women. Oh, wait....

Jack said...

The new castrati is right. In my imagined response to the author of "Men, Who Needs them?" I referred to him as a "castrati in the choir of anti-male leftists"

And thank you, btw, for this virtual haven of sanity in an otherwise very actually insane world. It is greatly appreciated.

Gagdad Bob said...

Thank you for populating the island.

Gagdad Bob said...

Otherwise it would be a pretty lʘnely island.

julie said...

To the NYT article, one other claim the author made toward the beginning I thought was particularly stupid: that single motherhood doesn't hurt children, but rather poverty does. He is either being incredibly disingenuous or profoundly misled; single motherhood is one of the most likely ways a family will end up impoverished in a way that is harmful to children, whereas the mere state of being poor does not, in and of itself, mean that the children will be negatively affected.

Lack of a father just as often also means lack of a mother, as the burden of taking on both roles virtually guarantees that she will be able to adequately perform neither...

Van Harvey said...

It is of course not just an attack on men, it goes all the way down to as far as falling can fall.

To deny men are 'neccessary' is to deny the nature of who you as a human being are, to deny one half is simply a means to denying the whole.

To deny the man, is to deny the father; it reduces the trinity to a duality (though more to the point, a duality which must be propped up by a disembodied Power - govt.

Geometrically, to discard the third is to discard pattern and, depth, dropping from the potential of hierarchy in a triangle, to a flat line where all is as low as you can go.

Rick said...

I don't get it. Women had all the power already.
Ask George Costhandza!

Rick said...

Give a woman a choice between a man and a man and she'll choose the man every time.

Gagdad Bob said...

Interesting that liberal women choose a powerful male substitute, even if it is stupid and broke. Shows how they always go for the "bad boy" loser.

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

Jack - this idea of 'being in your fathers' has two explanations.

One is a misreading of biology that stems from Augustine's improperly translated Latin copy of Romans.

The other is spiritual and not unrelated, and has to do with the telos of your being being prefigured before your arrival, even in a sense, the sins which you would commit. This is because God knows beforehand what you will do even if he tries to prevent you from doing it. Therefore, in preparation, those countervailing forces must gather mostly naturalistically. Thus, original sin can be, even if it should be rejected as a dogma, understood to mean God's dispensation for the future sins of every man, freely chosen, that he foreknew. In this sense we were even in loins of Adam!

See the Prayers by the Lake by St. Nikolai - I think it is the second prayer.

Anna said...

Bob said... "Shows once again how so-called secular humanism is really subhumanism."

That is a keeper. Right there is a gold mine as it shows that proper humanism or humanism proper is not secular. The two often get confused as being the same thing.

Anna said...

As soon as it is secular, you lose the human... An important 2-level structure to not compress -- human as a category is dependent on God. As I understand it, humanism (of around 1500, not that I am an expert... thinking mainly of the little book "Oration on The Dignity of Man"...) came about by someone looking at God and describing what he saw that humans are, *in light of that*. It was never just an eye on the human being. (Until later.) The dignity of man being God, and who man is because of God.

So I guess it is secular subhumanism!

Mizz E said...

Between the Nilometer and the Realometer we have Mark Steyn's latest column: War on women? The real war is on children.

Sal said...

Wonderful quote, Ms. E. Heard something just like it on Dr. Phil (I know, I know) years ago- a mom and daughter at odds b/c the daughter couldn't accept that people can only do what they can do.
Or as the fundie Evangelical preacher sermonized: "Expectations Ruin Relationships".

I recognized the sanity and joyousness of Chesterton, but his style always irked me, until (due to Bob re: Joyce) I decided to look at it as a true lover of language at play. Instead of "Oh, the cleverness of me! Did you see what I just did there?"
Helped tremendously, so thanks, Bob.

Sue said...

Speaking of secularism and what is usually called religion in our time and place, I wonder what category of being the various key-note speakers at the GOP convention in Florida would fit in to.

Speaking of the GOP convention, with all of its faked self-serving religiosity and hype about "God", I wonder what Jesus would make of it if he happened to re-appear again?

Jesus, or any other living Saint, or even a sane well-balanced human being would of course not be found any where near such a grotesque freak show.

Gagdad Bob said...

Sue is William's more masculine alter-ego.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Why say you wonder when you already think you know, "Sue?"

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"...sane well-balanced human being..."

Coming from a boy named Sue that's rich.

Gagdad Bob said...

A Boy Named Sue or My Girl Bill?

Theme Song

Theme Song