The Secret of Existence is Just Under the...

Continuing with our discussion of the Prerogatives of the Human State, I should say first of all that I am decades past the point of wondering whether there are any such prerogatives.

Rather, humanness entails certain rights and privileges, and that's all there is to it. Moreover, once you acknowledge these, then God is their necessary corollary: in short, no God, no conceivable privileges (except those man usurps for himself by the exercise of superior strength).

The Founders clearly recognized this entailment, for which reason they explicitly anchored our rights in Nature (i.e., in the nature of things, not in mere physics or biology) and Nature's God. For as the blind squirrel Jean Paul Sartre once remarked, if there is no God, then there is no human nature. And if there is no human nature, then there are no conceivable prerogatives.

Which -- you will have noticed -- is the main reason why the left ceaselessly attacks God, because God is the biggest impediment to their tyrannical follies. Eliminate Nature's God and they can do whatever they want to us, from mere theft and oppression to genocide. God is the barrier between the roiling id of the left and civilization.

Exaggeration? Again, once you have determined that someone is a Nazi, then it becomes a question of how to stop him. If he won't stop his Nazi-ing, then he has to be stopped by force. Call Maxine Waters what you want, but she is logical enough to make the correct deduction. Yes, the premise is insane, but this only reveals the limits of logic, since there is no logical operation to ensure true premises.

Prerogative: an exclusive right or privilege held by a person or group, especially a hereditary or official right.

In this case it is held by a group, or better, a nature, i.e., human nature. These prerogatives inhere in human nature, flowing from there to the individual. Note that for the materialist, there is no vocabulary to even describe this reality. He doesn't have to account for it, because he makes it disappear via linguistic deception or auto-woolpullery.

But as we have said on many occasions, you can split off and deny a portion of reality, but it always returns, usually with a vengeance. This has so much practical application that it could easily send us down a rabbit hole of a sidepost, but suffice it to say that human nature will have the last word(s) -- including those prerogatives alluded to above.

How so? Okay, this is an obvious example: if you are a strict Darwinian, then there is no reason to take seriously the radically contingent thoughts of a randomly evolved primate. And yet, you affirm the theory just as if truth exists and man can know it -- in other words, as if truth about his origins is one of the prerogatives of the human state!

Which it is. On that we agree. Only my metaphysic explains how this is possible, whereas yours renders it strictly impossible, in principle and in fact. Notice how you denied this principle up front, but how it snuck up from behind and bit you right in your assumption.

Now, having said all this, "the effects of the 'the Fall' weaken the prerogatives of human nature, but they cannot abolish them without abolishing man himself" (Schuon).

And this "Fall" is whatnow? Well, unfortunately, part of being fallen involves a degree of obscurity and ambiguity surrounding this question. As it so happens, just last night I was reading the very book Thomas Aquinas was working on when he left this world, Light of Faith: The Compendium of Theology. Yes, he died in mid-sentence, or mid-thought anyway:

"Secondly, an evident example shows that attainment of the kingdom is possible."

D'oh! "The treasure is buried right under the..."

Anyway, he sheds some interesting light on the question of the Fall. I'll paraphrase, but he essentially says it is a consequence of a kind of breaking of the vertical link that unifies all of creation.

Imagine an organismic hierarchy, say, the human person. You can sever something at the "bottom" or periphery, say, a kidney or toe, without affecting the hierarchy or damaging the essence. But perform a lobotomy or sever the spinal cord, and everything below is affected.

It's a matter of telos, since an organismic system is organized and governed from the top down. Eliminate the top -- in this case, God -- and what happens to the whole?

Prior to the Fall, man "referred all things to God as to his last end, and in this his justice and innocence consisted." The resultant harmony "came from a higher power, the power of God." Reason was subservient to God -- which goes to the question raised above about one's premises holding water (or Waters, as the case may be). Remove God, and one can prove anything. Put another way, if you are credulous enough to believe God doesn't exist, then what won't you believe?

So, "The state enjoyed by man" -- that of primordial slack -- "depended on the submission of the human will to God." Yes, Adam had one job. Now we have Ten Commandments, but once upin a timeless there was only one. The precise opposite of this one commandment is: Ye shall be as gods. The rest is history, over and over and over again until you want to vomit.

The harmonious integrity of the original state depended entirely on the submission of man's will to God. Consequently, as soon as the human will threw off the yoke of subjection to God, the perfect subjection of the lower powers to reason and of the body to the soul likewise disintegrated.

As in dis-integrated. And we've been searching for the missing integration ever since. Every ideology is nothing more than a faux integration, from Marxism to feminism to environmentalism to queer theory to scientism and on and on. In each case, you can't get there from here, for "when a cause is removed, the effect cannot follow." God is both first and last cause. Remove him and there is no beginning, no source, no ground; and no end, i.e., no meaning, no purpose, no reason for existence.

That's the bad news. The good news ("gospel") is that there is a way to re-integrate, to reconnect with the source. Yes, attainment of the kingdom is possible...

To be continued. Unlike Aquinas.