Wednesday, October 01, 2014

The Cosmic Redemption Center

"Pride prevents intelligence become rationalism from rising to its source" (Schuon). Rather, in denying its source -- which is both deeper and higher -- it replaces Spirit with matter, thus accomplishing the Inversion of inversions, or Mother of All Demons: "proud reason" denies "its own nature," but this hardly prevents it from thinking -- if you call that thought!

The end result is that "torrents of intelligence are wasted for the sake of conjuring away the essential and brilliantly proving the absurd" (ibid.).

It seems that this is what the Obama administration has been reduced to (minus the brilliance) on every front: cobbling together a world that exists only in speech, while insisting that our eyes and bank accounts deceive us.

I know. Breaking news from 2008!

The dogged attempt to conform to the ideological fantasy world of the left is what got us into this multidimensional mess to begin with. I wouldn't even call these dopes ideologues; emotiologues is more like it. The left doesn't actually have an intelligentsia, only a bitter resentia or sappy sentimentia.

The Good News is preceded by the Bad News -- which is precisely what makes it good. In other words, if you haven't first been apprised of the bad news, then the good news will make no sense. It will have no context.

What is liberalism but a systematic attempt to deny people their right to hear the bad news, and to thereby get their affairs in order and handle their isness?

Regarding the bad news, the mature person will say to the physician: give it to me straight, doc! Don't sugarcoat it.

Okay. The bad news is that you have fallen and you can't get up -- at least not on your own, and not all the way.

The good news? There is help, as nonlocal operators are always standing by, ready to assist you.

Me? I don't believe in "guardian angels." Rather, I just rely on mine for all he's worth.

About this fall: it seems -- as alluded to in paragraph one above -- that it is very much wrapped up in this thing called "pride." Indeed, it has always been known that pride cometh before a clusterfark, and that an arrogant attitude precedes a fall landslide.

Now, to even say "fall" is to imply verticality. In the absence of the vertical there is no place to fall, nor any place to ascend to, except in one's own eyes (customarily projected into others in order to mirror and confirm one's pride). What is the lust for fame but a misguided search for confirmation of one's wrongness (i.e., that wrong is right)? Even I am sometimes subject to this temptation, because how could 26 Raccoons be wrong about me?

The contemporary world -- its dominant mentality -- is a tangle of inversions that proceed from the first. This, in my opinion, is what it means to be born into sin. A man cannot exist without a world, even an inverted one. We all have to conform ourselves in some form or fashion to this corrupt place, unless we are given the gift of total detachment, like a Saint Francis. But few people have that particular calling.

Pride --> Fall. Fall --> Stubborn arrogance. Absence of humility --> Gradual loss of ability to recognize, revere, and bow down before what surpasses oneself. ObamaWorld.

Now, there is something about falling that results in "brokenness," as in fragmentation and loss of wholeness. Who claims to be whole? Show me this man, and I will show you an unredeemed assoul!

Conveniently, I am reading a book by Balthasar called A Theological Anthropology, which has also been published as Man in History, but in the original German as The Whole in the Fragment. One might say "the health in the brokenness," or "the one in the many," or "the God in the man," or "the voice in my head."

In chapter one, Balthasar speaks of encountering God in the upper vertical; since he is "already there," this is something like a memory, even though it is a new experience.

And to "think," (quoting Augustine) is "to take things that the memory already contained, but scattered and unarranged, and, by thinking, bring them together."

In this regard, it seems that love and unity go together like... pride and fragmentation: for by engaging in disciplined verticalisthenics, "we are collected and bound up into unity within oneself, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity" (Augustine). Just as the Fall brings fragmentation in its wake, the assent reveals wholeness, or begins to heal the fragmentation (health and wholeness being cognates):

"To descend into time means to 'wander away,' to 'fall away,' to... sink into the abyss which the creature would be by himself, without God's creative and grace-bestowing act..." (Balthasar). "Turned away from unchanging truth," man "drifts in folly and wretchedness" (Augustine).

You might say that the ascending person and descending light meet in a spiroidal, "ever-increasing mutual penetration" (Balthasar).

Critically, this occurs in matter, in the body, and in history, not in some timeless, unchanging platonic realm above, a la Plotinus or Buddhism. In order to undo the great cosmic inversion, we must both turn around and look up, so that God, so to speak, may be down and in with us. Emmanuel.

In this way time is no longer the corrosive and entropic enemy of the Gnostics, but rather, the medium of creativity -- including the creative response to God, which indeed "redeems the time."

So yes, that is correct: the Raccoon lodge is not unlike the sacred "redemption center" where we bring our old containers to be recycled and remade into new ones.

Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. --2 Cor 4:16

23 comments:

Gagdad Bob said...

Inversion.

Brazentide said...

We all have to conform ourselves in some form or fashion to this corrupt place, unless we are given the gift of total detachment, like a Saint Francis. But few people have that particular calling.

Total detachment (in an interior sense) seems to be a universal call. Of course, detachment ≠ passivity. Rather, it is the proper ordering of all goods to serve their higher purpose.

Perhaps the example of Francis and the austerity of religious orders is an external demonstration of what we should all strive for internally.

Brazentide said...

Sadly, my attempts at detachment often seem to end somewhere around the hazy (and lazy) borders of quietism...

Tony said...

"I wouldn't even call these dopes ideologues; emotiologues is more like it. The left doesn't actually have an intelligentsia, only a bitter resentia or sappy sentimentia."

*happy dance*

Tony said...

Brazentide

Funny you should mention that. I just spent some time in a Trappist monastery.

ted said...

because how could 26 Raccoons be wrong about me?

Hmm. That many?

Gagdad Bob said...

I'm counting the ones who have gone on to Bismarck.

julie said...

Gone, but not forgotten.

"To descend into time means to 'wander away,' to 'fall away,' to... sink into the abyss which the creature would be by himself, without God's creative and grace-bestowing act..." (Balthasar). "Turned away from unchanging truth," man "drifts in folly and wretchedness" (Augustine).

...

So yes, that is correct: the Raccoon lodge is not unlike the sacred "redemption center" where we bring our old containers to be recycled and remade into new ones.


Thus, even though our brotherhood may be scattered far and wide, we still manage to find our way back.

I was thinking today, in light of the news, about what might happen if Ebola reaches epidemic proportions here; in the aftermath, I imagine many if not most people will find themselves traveling, in some way that they hope will be from "lost" to "found."

mushroom said...

...a systematic attempt to deny people their right to hear the bad news ...

That is a good definition.

It encompasses more than what we usually think of as liberalism, which is mostly limited to a political brand. These are the people with whom we are at war.

God always tells you the bad news.

mushroom said...

The conclusion is really beautiful, unifying in love.

julie said...

Apropos, seen at Ace's:

"I've been noting this for some time. The media and the government -- essentially, these two institutions have fused; they are partner operations in the same corporation -- endlessly peddle fictions to the public on the theory that the public cannot handle the truth, and will panic, or bomb mosques, if they are told the truth."

Notably, this past week after the latest round of beheadings, I saw a headline article at Yahoo about increasing incidences of hate crimes against Muslims. I didn't actually look at the numbers, but suspect that the reality is something like, "last year there were two, and this year there have been four." In spite of everything that is happening right now, it simply goes against the grain for mainstream, non-crazy Americans to act out that way. The media is like a gigantic, shushing busybody, hissing at people to "simmer down" if they have the audacity to ask a question or make an observation, as though the immediate next step will be a violent uprising. In the event people do get around to panicking, they will probably still be standing in the same place, shrieking now, "EVERYBODY REMAIN CALM!!! ALL IS WELL!!" while the world burns down around them. Either way, they will be profoundly ignorant of what is really happening. In trying to keep everybody else in the dark, they will be the least likely to know the truth.

Cousin Dupree said...

Even an intellectually and morally challenged relative is in on the inversive act. Your tax dollars at work!

julie said...

You must be the white sheep of the family.

Gagdad Bob said...

Or the Marilyn Munster.

julie said...

:D

But seriously - did he just argue that we should fight evil in the world by flagellating ourselves?

Cousin Dupree said...

Keep it clean!

Gagdad Bob said...

I just happened to read a book on Eric Holder's Justice Department that demonstrates quite persuasively that Obama is the worst nightmare of anyone who still believes in racial equality before the law. As if we didn't know.

But to conflate Reagan's religiously based critique with Obama's Marxist-inspired one is auto-craniorectal insertion of the highest order.

julie said...

It's like he's arguing that a fire department should work on putting out wildfires, but only after they have a long and meaningful internal review about who left the coffee pot on all night and ran up the electric bill. And then have a seminar on "Stop, Drop, and Roll," and how to avoid collateral damage while rolling. Maybe after that they can send some trucks over to the raging inferno, but they have to be careful not to damage any endangered species in the process, and they can't use too much water, it isn't fair to the fire.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Blogger Gagdad Bob said...
"I just happened to read a book on Eric Holder's Justice Department that demonstrates quite persuasively that Obama is the worst nightmare of anyone who still believes in racial equality before the law. As if we didn't know.

But to conflate Reagan's religiously based critique with Obama's Marxist-inspired one is auto-craniorectal insertion of the highest order."

Egads! That's some weapons-grade stupid.

Van Harvey said...

"What is liberalism but a systematic attempt to deny people their right to hear the bad news, and to thereby get their affairs in order and handle their isness?"

Yep, which explains the proRegressive's dislike of actual history.

“Regarding the bad news, the mature person will say to the physician: give it to me straight, doc! Don't sugarcoat it."

... whereas the leftie renames it 'Social Studies' and makes it all politically correct.

Arghhh.

Van Harvey said...

And of course if you don't know how bad you can be, there will be little fear of how bad you will be, once you're 'free' to be whoever you want to be.

Anonymous said...

It seems to me that the Inversion is also what is meant by the Bible verse about the evil in calling something evil, good. And the current brutal ugliness in music and architecture (with even Catholic Churches that look like concrete prisons) is further evidence of this phenomenon.

Gagdad Bob said...

And evils must come, but woe to the assouls through whom they do.

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