Liberalism is a Spiritual Abortifacient

Clarke has an excellent working definition of the unsaturated pneumaticon (↑): it is the

"innate, unrestricted drive of the human spirit... toward the Infinite Good," the "great hidden dynamo that energizes our whole lives, driving us to ever new levels of growth and development..." It is what makes us restless for nothing less than the ultimate rest.

So, it is an energy, but like any other energy, it cannot determine the use to which it will be put (e.g., gasoline can power your car or make a molotov cocktail).

Thus, while "this radical dynamism rooted in our spiritual nature" is "the dynamic a priori of the human spirit as such," it can be misused and misdirected into, say, ideology, which is just the modern version of idolatry; ideology is always ideolatry.

You really need a kind of dynamic... double-cross to capture our total situation, one that would combine these two movements: (⇅) and (⇆).

For one thing, although we are ordered to the Infinite Good, it seems that the creation is ordered to us; which is why, for starters, we are able to study and understand it so deeply. Because we are "spirit wedded to matter," we are indeed the microcosm, i.e., "a synthesis of the whole universe" (ibid.).

Thus we are not confined to the horizontal peregrinations of (⇆), but can rise "above the dispersion of space and time to live in the spiritual horizon of supra-material meaning and values" -- i.e., shoot our eros into the heart of the metacosmic source and "set [our] sights on the Infinite and the Eternal" (ibid.).

Therefore, we can -- so to speak -- raise science (⇆) up to God and place it in its proper context. Nothing short of this suffices, because a world of pure (⇆) would be ultimately incomprehensible and thoroughly pointless. Pure vanity.

For Pieper, this is the whole point of a Liberal Education:

"[E]ducation as the activity of educating means presenting the whole of reality to the gaze of the student and listener, giving access to the totality of the world and showing the multiplicity of what we encounter to be both one and whole."

But "How can I bring anything to anyone's gaze if I don't see it myself?" In short, nowadays a "liberal education" amounts to crashing into the impenetrable Wall of Tenure and calling it a road trip.

This is why religion will never "die out," because it -- however adequately or inadequately -- always addresses itself to the Whole.

"The decisive point" in a real education "is that the world as a whole comes into focus" (ibid.). Contrast this with the education of the typical SJW, which restricts this tOtality to a tiny keyhØle of perceived victimhood and persecution. Talk about looking through the wrong end of the telos-scope!

Compare this with the grandeur of a proper education: "the human mind, like every spiritual being, is by its very nature a receptacle for the whole of reality" (ibid.). This receptacle is a womb, and this living womb is the opposite of the left wing educational matrix that prevents the second birth.

Really, liberalism in general is a spiritual abortifacient. Until this is recognized, the fight over abortion per se will unfortunately be somewhat beside the point.

[I]t is always the case that there is, in truth, a strong longing for a grasp of the totality.... No branch of the sciences inquires about the world as a whole. But philosophy is concerned precisely with this -- with the totality in all its aspects. --Josef Pieper