Another Obsolete, Immature, and Trivial Post

I'd like to finish our review of Exercises in the Elements, partly because I have two more newly reissued books by Pieper in the piepline (Traditional Truth, Poetry, Sacrament and The Weight of Belief: Essays on Faith in the Modern Age), and there's no sense in starting them until this one has been digested. Otherwise it's like Chinese theology: read it and you're hungry an hour later.

No disrespect to Mr. Pieper, but we really think alike. Same attractor, same approach. You might call it novelty within tradition, or creative thinking within the constraints of sacred doctrine. Anyone can be creative without constraints, but then that's not really creativity, or rarely so, anyway. To live outside the law you must be honest, and to live outside tradition you'd damn well better be a spiritual genius. And even then, a spiritual genius will probably do better by working with traditional materials.

It makes sense that the most fruitful approach is to confine oneself to the constraints handed to us by God himself. Conversely, just look at what happens to thought when these constraints are ignored, or we imagine we can do without them. In so many ways, the culture war comes down to a bifurcation between these two visions; DSIB (Davila says it best:

--The modern desire to be original makes the mediocre artist believe that simply being different is the secret to being original.

--Originality must adhere to the continuity of a tradition.

--Conformity and nonconformity are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality.

--Ideas less than a thousand years old are not fully reliable.

--Nothing is more outdated at any moment than yesterday’s novelty.

--Nobody thinks seriously as long as originality is important to him.

--Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, and trivial to the serious man, we have to start over.

As I said a couple weeks ago, I'm going to just highlight some passages that stood out for me, and then try to stop myself from adding too much nauseam:

[I]n the midst of the evolutionary process the human spirit is not something developing like everything else but is incomprehensibly a new reality which is not undergoing transition, and which does not "become," but emerges "finished" from its origin in the creator and remains directly connected with it.

This is such a fundamental and consequential point that I could indeed expand upon it for the rest of this post. The point is that in the midst of a cosmos in which everything is evolving, has appeared a being who cannot be a mere product of contingent evolution. Early in my vertical career I was lumped in with the evolutionary mob (in fact, Prof. Wiki says I still am), even though I wouldn't be caught dead with most of them.

(Brief asnide: Trump and a Post-Truth World? Bitch please. What a self-beclowning tool Wilber has become. But that's what happens when one omnisciently presumes to ignore the God-given constraints referenced above. An exercise in grotesque egotism masquerading as egolessness peddled to a spiritually obtuse crowd of spiritual retards, self-righteous narcissists, and postmodern ignoramuses.)

Human beings are not going to "evolve" into something beyond human; we are not merely links in the evolutionary chain between us and something better, as we are already conformed to the Absolute, and there can be by definition nothing beyond the Absolute. It doesn't mean we can't more adequately conform to it, and this is indeed the point of the spiritual life. DSIB:

--The mind of the individual does not “evolve.” We only orchestrate with greater or lesser talent the themes we are born with.

Theology is translation from infinitude to finitude. Therefore, strictly speaking, it is impossible, at least for man:

"[T]he business of the theologian necessarily requires 'bilingualism,'" a translation from and to. A "literalist" collapses the two, or pretends that no translation is required, no familiarity with the two worlds. You will notice that atheists are as (if not more) prone to this as are fundamentalists, as they insist on treating scripture as the "thing itself" instead of being a translation about the thing itself. The thing itself (O) surely exists, but the scriptural map is not the divine territory.

The divine authors "speak," but we must hear through them "what cannot be fully and adequately expressed in any historical language." As Schuon would say, the language provides "points of reference" between the two worlds, very much in the manner of a beautiful painting, which is obviously a two-dimensional rendering of a three (or more) dimensional reality. I say "more" because the gifted artist is also able to convey interior realities, e.g., the inscape of a landscape or the soul of the person. How is this even possible? And yet, there it is.

At any rate, "it is clear that theology, strictly speaking... by its very nature exceeds the capabilities of any individual, no matter how gifted" -- any more than the gifted artist could depict visually the "place" from which art pours into our world.

Nor can theology be done in the absence of "loving faith," because what's the alternative? Hateful cynicism? That's not going to get you far, because ultimate knowledge of God must involve conformity to him, and God is not a hateful cynic. "Theological knowledge cannot be fruitful except as

knowledge based on fundamental solidarity, even loving identification, by virtue of which the infinite object appears not as something alien but is directly one's own.

In this regard, love is less a sentiment than a link between two subjects, through which divinity flows. DSIB:

--We only love in our life the presences that cross it like messengers from other worlds.