Substance-in-Relation & Some Dunce Ruining the Nation

A plurality that cannot be integrated into unity is chaos; unity unrelated to plurality is tyranny. --Pascal

We already discussed Letter V, the Pope, so we're moving on to Letter VI, The Lover.

For Tomberg, the central theme of this card is the vow of chastity, esoterically understood. For "one is chaste only when one loves with the totality of one's being." Therefore, there is no true love in the absence of chastity -- and vice versa.

Chastity is the living unity and wholeness in being whereby body, soul, and spirit become one -- not through a merger that effaces differences but through a harmony that... harmonizes them. This is not uniformity but unity. It is the return of the many to the One, both in oneself and with the other, the former via the latter, meaning that, ironically, it takes two to be at one. (Technically three, but we'll get to that later.)

The bottom line is that two's company and three's a cloud. By which I apparently mean that a cloud has no discrete boundaries except from a distance. Inside the cloud, boundaries become blurry and indistinct. One cloud merges with another. Likewise,

"There is a difference between spiritual things and bodily things. Every spiritual thing can dwell in another." And "Where I am, there God is; and then I am in God, and where God is, there I am" (Eckhart). When wholeness comes, the partial vanishes (1 Cor. 13:10).

As usual, the psychospiritual left embodies a direct inversion of this two-in-oneness principle. For instead of beginning with the individual-seeking-unity, it is in perpetual rebellion against the individual. Rather, it posits the exterior collective -- i.e., the benevilant state -- whereby our fragmentation and alienation are "cured." Remember last year's DNC? The State is the only thing to which we all belong! Or else.

Taken to its logical extreme, such a cure represents "perfect integration through perfect fragmentation. That is, the perfect unity of the state requires the utter destruction of all autonomous social bonds, rendering each individual more isolated and powerless..." (Taylor). It is as if the left grinds humanity to dust, molds this desiccated clay into its new-and-improved man, and then breaths the spirit of Marx into him.

The critical point is that our drive toward unity can become as perverse and pathological as any other drive. The secular left creates a unity alright, but it is a physical unity only, a reduction to uniform matter and thus no unity of soul or spirit.

Which is why leftism always yields to the totalitarian temptation, for every free thinker is a reminder that this faux unity has not been achieved. It is why they hate Fox News, why they have campus speech codes, why they are tossing Bob Woodward under the bus, and why they enforce political correctness more generally.

Tomberg writes that "to feel something as real in the measure of its full reality is to love." Obviously, it is no coincidence that Genesis discusses human sexuality in terms of knowledge. Is the Torah simply confused on this matter? Or perhaps disclosing a reality from which the tenured have exiled themselves?

Imagine a typically prudish "human sexuality" class that leaves out the very reality without which sexuality is not human. Obviously, there is no need to imagine it, because the purpose of all leftist ideology is to demoralize and make us less than what we are, which is to say, human (in the full sense of the term -- body-soul-spirit).

Rightly ordered love -- like any other human activity -- has an end, a telos. To pretend that this telos is no different from any other animal is to live in an infrahuman fantasy world.

To love someone is to begin the process of knowing a person in their full reality. The operative word is begin, for as Bion theorized, love is a link (L) between subjects. It merely gets the party started. Until we forge that link, the Other is not really real, just a piece of psychic furniture.

Now, matter is obviously a kind of "one," but represents an inverted doctrine of spiritual oneness. This material oneness is the false unity that inspires the left, and is the basis of their first political principle, i.e., "what's yours is mine," or "you work, I eat."

How do we escape the prison of our narcissism? Primarily through love, because love partakes of being, which is intersubjective right down to the ground. Being is substance-in-relation, or self-communicating love. And participation in this movement of love is "the very rhythm of Being" (Norris).

Here is how John Paul II once expressed it: "Let us have no illusions: unless we follow this spiritual path, external structures of communion will serve very little purpose. They would become mechanisms without soul, 'masks' of communion rather than its means of expression and growth." Real communion is a dynamic unity that "unites persons one to the other in a cause greater than themselves" (ibid.).

Tomberg writes that there are two principle methods of overcoming our cosmic narcissism, generally corresponding to eastern and western religions (although each has both; it is merely a matter of emphasis).

The first is obliteration of the illusory ego, so that one becomes a "shadow among shadows." This is the "equality of indifference." If the separate "I" doesn't exist, then we're all one. Being that the ego is the ultimate illusion, just vanquish that illusion, and the doors of perception are cleansed (although nobody's oming behind the door).

The above approach to circumnavelgazing the soul strikes an unbiblical chord in us. We prefer the other way, which is to extend the love that one has for oneself to other beings. Instead of "me dead, you dead," it's "me living, you living" -- i.e., extend the vertical horizontally, and love the neighbor as oneself.

Now, this is difficult to do. Obviously. But you don't try to do it all at once. Rather, you start with a small circle, and then gradually widen the circle. Start at the center, not the periphery. Try loving your neighbor before The Planet. Again, the left begins at the periphery. Obama is the great Unifier. But what kind of unity is it that doesn't even recognize my real existence? I'm not some ant in the leftist hive:

"When a Marxist says 'power to the people,' he isn't talking about actual people.... It takes no time at all to realize that Marxists and their intellectual offspring have no use for actual people in general, and only one use for 'actual people' who do want what they're supposed to want. They treat them like pets."

Tomberg returns to Genesis, where God says that "it is not good that Adam should be alone," which is to say that "it is not good that man should love nobody but his lonesome." And God wasn't just ribbing, for he then creates the complementary other, who is actually of the same substance as Adam, even a part of himself. To love is to recognize the prior unity: "In the beginning there was only one love and its source was one, since its principle is one." (Recall again that the one being is substance-in-relation.)

Again, love has to do with the recovery of higher unity, not the imposition of a lower uniformity. This is a key point. Tomberg agrees that this reality is precisely inverted by the left, but also by old-fashioned Freudianism.

In the case of the left, it elevates economic interest to all. In the case of Freud, he elevated the sexual instinct to all. You might say that the left reduces everything to the first chakra, Freudianism to the second. And both are entirely compatible with materialism, scientism, and metaphysical Darwinism, which attempt to account for the top by reducing it to the bottom. That's not love. It is hate. Hatred of reality.

Naturalism is not so much a love of matter as a rejection of, or inability to apprehend, that which transcends it. This is why Obama feels that the founders erred in writing a constitution that made it such a hassle for him to appropriate our stuff and give it to others, or why his pal Bill Ayers feels he "didn't do enough" back in his days as a loving domestic terrorist. But he shouldn't worry. As an "educational reformer," he's destroying more young souls than he could ever have hoped to as a bomb-tossing psychopath.

Only a culpably self-deluded fool cannot perceive the hatred that drives Obama and the spiritually cancerous movement he represents.

Just as there is one God in three Persons..., we are all "members of one another"; there is, and we are called to become, a single Man in a multitude of persons. --Olivier Clement