Prisons of Knowledge and Adventures in Faith

We never did finish our discussion of Purcell's From Big Bang to Big Mystery before veering into Hitler and the Germans, but the two are actually intimately related, in that Purcell's entire approach is deeply indebted to Voegelin, who is one of the most panoptic thinkers we've discussed here at One Cosmos.

One reason Voegelin is qualified to describe and analyze the spiritual and intellectual pathologies that made Hitler possible, is that he spent his life trying to understand the logospheric and pneumatic conditions that make humanness possible. Again: unless we know what health is, we won't be in a position to recognize, diagnose, and treat pathology.

Aphorism: The conservative is a simple pathologist. He defines sickness and health. But God is the only therapist (NGD).

Also, Voegelin himself embodied the very quest he describes, without in any way compromising his scholarship. Analogously, it takes a mystic to write about mysticism, which is precisely what is wrong with most academic works on mysticism, or even on religion in general. Certain topics -- indeed, the most important ones --- can only be discussed and described from the inside.

As described in the Coona Cosmologica, it is the difference between mere (k) and (n), or ego-based knowledge and nous-centered intellect-vision. Clearly, when it comes to religion, anything other than interior, experiential knowledge is a more or less distant abstraction.

This is not to say that certain things can't be a matter of faith, but faith itself is tacit foreknowledge of as yet undiscovered realities. Not only can faith be verified, but one might say that the religious life consists in an unending verification of it. Schuon:

There is no faith without any knowledge, nor knowledge without any faith....

The mystery of faith is in fact the possibility of an anticipatory perception in the absence of its content; that is, faith makes present its content by accepting it already, before the perception properly so-called. And if faith is a mystery, it is because its nature is inexpressible to the degree that it is profound, for it is not possible to convey fully by words this vision that is still blind and this blindness that already sees.

Thus, a deep and secure faith is already a kind of confirmation that resonates through the being and yields a harvest of its own. In other words, it is creative -- one might say organic -- never static.

This is also the difference between good and bad dogma, or just dogma properly understood. Dogma is a tool, not just a static system to be superimposed on the intellect. It is a probe with which we poke around in the suprasensible dark, in the way a blind man uses a cane to visualize the space within which he moves.

Now, can dogma be misused and misunderstood? Of course. This is like asking if humans are human, which they tend to be. Everything touched by humans can be and is misused and abused -- science, art, religion, the Constitution, sex, grog, music, education, baseball (the DH), my comment section. There is no end of things that are goods in themselves until the moment human beings get their grubby hands on them.

Why is this? That would require a very lengthy explanation, hence the virtue of dogma, i.e., man's fallen condition, which is a kind of compact and shorthand wisdom that takes one straight to the bottom lyin'. Most people don't have the time or the mental capacity to think these things through on their own, which is unnecessary anyway if they just take it on faith that man is imperfectible and denial of this only makes matters worse.

To jump ahead a bit, Voegelin defines the essence of health as a condition of intellectual and spiritual openness. Just as there are intellectual illiterates, there are spiritual illiterates.

And when Voegelin uses the term "illiterate," he doesn't mean it in the sense of merely being unable to read. Rather, especially in a mass-educated society such as ours, the ability to read has little to do with actually being literate, as our troll [William] ably proves every day with the breezy self-assurance of the fully indoctrinated. For Voegelin, illiteracy isn't just the failure to assimilate good literature, but the inability to even recognize it.

And for the left, the mere possession of literary taste is sufficient to qualify one as a fascist. Nor can one merely have no taste; rather, one must have bad taste to be on the left. One must truly believe that "diversity" is a criterion of aesthetic quality.

For our troll, some cut-and-paste nonsense pulled up from the fringes of the internet is as deep and learned as, say, Voegelin, or Plato, or Eckhart, or Thomas, or Schuon, or the Upanishads, or Tomberg, or Balthasar, or the whole host of magnificent thinkers who have graced mankind by illuminating and mapping the transcendent order.

I was about to say that without them we'd be in a deep hole, but that wouldn't be quite correct, because in a two-dimensional world there are neither holes nor peaks, just... desires and fears, or pleasure and pain.

Which is certainly one way to order one's life, but it doesn't in any way correspond to the wider order of the cosmos, and the whole point of life, if we could express it in a single sentence, is to conform oneself to the transcendent order of reality. For what is the alternative? To order oneself to illusion? That works too, at least for a time, but reality has a way of breaking through the little manmade orders we impose upon it. And killing lots of people in the process.

Ironically, to think in so simplistic a manner -- i.e., God isn't real because science supposedly says so (itself a gross misunderstanding of, and insult to, science) -- is so deeply anti-human as to beggar belief, because in one cretinous wave of the hand it eliminates all that is best and brightest in man's 50,000 year quest to understand his ground and destiny.

This was Voegelin's main beef with academia. In his book Amanesis, he discusses this from up close, since he spent 50-odd years among the barbarian tribes of the tenured, and was in a position to know. He writes of how postmodern ideologues -- whether beholden to Marxism, scientism, evolutionism, feminism Freudianism, whatever -- all share the same characteristic of being closed systems which lose the ability to perceive reality over -- or under -- their own projections.

In other words, once one assimilates an ideology, percept follows concept, to such an extent that this second reality places a kind of blanket over first reality, which is never seen again. It is still there, of course, and continues to be unconsciously recognized. Thus, the ideologue senses this real reality -- in the same way that the person of faith senses real reality, except that the ideologue works feverishly to deny the perception. (It is why, for example, pro-abortion people are so frenzied about it; unconscious knowledge of guilt does strange but predictable things to a mind.)

This is why there can be no leftism in the absence of political correctness or some similar coercive structure to enforce its version of reality, since maintaining the second reality requires a kind of systematic advance-warning system to prevent people from traveling down certain chains of observation or reasoning. If that happens, the whole swindle collapses.

Voegelin asks -- and this was back in 1977 -- "Why do they [the tenured] expressly prohibit anybody to ask questions concerning the sectors of reality they have excluded from their personal horizon? Why do they want to imprison themselves in their restricted horizon and to dogmatize their prison reality as the universal truth? And why do they want to lock up all mankind in the prison of their making?"

This is not the open spirit in which this nation was founded, which was fundamentally a spirit of liberty, or one might say "spiritual freedom." Go north young man, into the vertical!

Now what is this "spiritual freedom?" Well, for any flatlander, such as our troll, it is a nonsense term. There's nothing we can do for him. But from the Raccoon perspective, it is all about vertical freedom, although vertical freedom is impossible, or at least quite difficult, in an atmosphere deprived of horizontal freedom. The damage that socialism, statism, and communism do to economic reality is one thing, but the more tragic and enduring damage is to the soul, which can again lose contact with the spiritual environment because of the systematic denial imposed by the regime.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are none other than the irreducible prerequisites of a spiritually and intellectually open stance toward the cosmos. The first two are obvious, since you won't get very far in your quest without your life and the freedom to live it in the manner you see fit.

But nor will you get very far without pursuing happiness, by which the founders certainly didn't mean just pleasure, or wealth, or notoriety. Rather, they meant it in the classic Greek sense of actualizing one's powers -- one's gifts -- in the direction of virtue. That is life. That is liberty. That is happiness. That is firing on all cylinders in hyperspace.

Because of so much time spent living in the Tenured Islands, Voegelin discovered a kind of restrictive horizon "similar to the consciousness that I could observe in the political mass movements" of the 20th century. Of course, one can only recognize the restriction if one is coming from a wider and more open horizon, which Voegelin surely was.

In the United States, he noticed "the populist expansion of the universities, accompanied by the inevitable inrush of functional illiterates into academic positions in the 1950s and 1960s." And now the ignorant beneficiaries of this academic inversion are in positions of power.

Regarding this openness to the subjective cosmic horizon, Voegelin writes that navigating it "is a ceaseless action of expanding, ordering, articulating, and correcting itself.... It is a permanent effort at responsive openness to the appeal of reality, at bewaring premature satisfaction, and above all at avoiding the self-destructive phantasy of believing" that reality "can be mastered by bringing it into the form of a system."

To say that reality is much richer than the ideological fantasies of the tenured is simultaneously obvious and yet necessary, since we are all victims of these fantasies in one way or another. Our human duty is to rebel against any system that attempts to imprison us in some manmode idiotolatry.

Two Ways to Rot One's Mind

Again, the theme of Hitler and the Germans is the idea that something had gone dreadfully wrong with German culture -- both intellectually and spiritually -- to allow a vicious cretin like Hitler to rise to power. In the absence of this more widespread problem, Hitler's faults would have remained personal rather than public and eventually world historical.

World-historical. Think about it. How on earth do the problems of a single man become everyone's problem? This is not the same as asking how a single person can become a problem, which any assoul can do. As they say, any idiot can make history, but it takes real genius to write it. Rather, we need to get beneath Hitler's "problem," to the deeper problem of a people blinded to the fact that, hey, this guy has a problem.

And when we say "German culture," there were, of course, exceptions -- people who saw through Hitler from the moment they laid eyes on him. Everyone would like to believe they were one of these clear-sighted volks, and in 1945 there were many more of them than there were in 1933, for the same reason that every Frenchman was a retrospective member of the tiny French resistance. People don't want to believe they were party to a lethal failure of judgment, but even in 1946 "a majority of Germans held the opinion that National Socialism was a good idea but badly implemented," and it was equally widely believed into the 1950s "that without the war, Hitler would have been one of the greatest statesmen in German history."

Among other things, Voegelin wanted to debunk the self-serving idea that Germans were simply seduced by a charismatic demagogue, because not everyone responded to Hitler's so-called charisma, and many people were repelled by him. Voegelin, for example, escaped Germany in 1938.

Voegelin traces the rot in Germany to a distinct spiritual decline which he attempts to describe both empirically and theoretically. To back up a bit, recall what we were saying a couple posts back about psychopathology (mental illness). In order to define mental pathology, we must begin with an implicit or explicit notion of psychic health. What exactly is a healthy psyche? To what is it ordered? What is it designed to do?

I KNOW I KNOW!: to seek and know truth, to create and love beauty, and to discern and will the good.

Right away you see the problem for any consistent materialist, since for him the psyche can have no purpose. Rather, it is just a meaningless side effect of the struggle to pass one's genes along to the next generation. From a purely biological standpoint, anything that gets the job done is "healthy," which is to say, adaptive: deception, rape, misogyny, polygamy. In fact, this is precisely why rape has survived, because it is indeed one effective way for losers to propagate their genetic material.

Hitler was just such a consistent materialist, but unlike most materialists, he actually drew out (albeit unwittingly) the ultimate implications of materialism, so give him credit for that. He was no hypocrite or waffler, that's for sure. He didn't pretend to be elevated above his nature, because nature is all there is. Again: the utter (and violent) rejection of transcendence.

Voegelin quotes one writer who observed that "no one before Hitler had actually made the consequences deduced from Darwin the basis of state policy, and no one before Hitler so consistently and ruthlessly carried those biological premises to their ultimate conclusions and put them into practice."

For as Darwin wrote, nature is "immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts," the difference being that Darwin was too constrained by Christian civilization to take this idea seriously and start killing his presumed inferiors.

To say that Hitler was influenced by Darwin is, of course, to give the tyrant way too much credit, since, like our troll [William Catsnuggler], he was an anti-intellectual who never entertained a serious idea in his life.

And besides, Darwin himself borrowed the phrase "survival of the fittest" from Herbert Spencer, the father of "social Darwinism." Thus, ironically, strict Darwinism is actually "biological Spencerism," which shows us how ideology -- i.e., second reality -- contaminates first reality, and is then regarded as a simple "fact" of nature. But the most rigid and unambiguous "facts" are often, as is this one, just projections (or declensions, so to speak, from higher to lower realties, e.g., the reduction of human sexuality to biological sexuality).

His ignorance of Darwin notwithstanding, Hitler was nevertheless a true metaphysical Darwinian and evolutionist, proclaiming that "the entire universe" is "ruled by just this one idea, that an eternal selection takes place in which the stronger in the end maintains the right to live, and the weaker falls. One will say that nature is therefore cruel and merciless, but the other will grasp that nature is thus only obeying an iron law of logic." Selfish genes, and all that.

And note how natural selection is now indeed being applied to the cosmos, in order to get around the problem of the big bang, which implies (or better, necessitates) a creative intelligence. If we are just the beneficiary of natural selection applied to multiple universes, the problem is solved. (Not really, of course, but it is kicked a little further down the ontological road.)

When the intellectual barbarian collapses the world to a single level, the distinction between Is and Ought is obliterated, for the Ought is quintessentially and irreducibly transcendent. And once you've accomplished this, then anything goes, for nothing can be impermissible. Worse, remove God from the equation and "we should not conclude that everything is permissible, but that nothing matters. Permits become laughable when their significance is canceled" (NGD).

In the end, "If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is" (ibid.).

This all raises an interesting point about the nature of spiritual rot. It occurs to me that there are two main types, what we might call "dry rot," and its seeming opposite, "wet rot." But the two actually go together, and in many ways define one another.

For example, the rationalist or scientistic atheist, who suffer from spiritual and intellectual dry rot, are forever doing battle with people who are prone to a kind of religious wet rot. In yesterday's thread, for example, saw a troll suffering from dry rot using this blog as a vehicle to lash out at some neighbors who have religious wet rot. We, of course, do not advocate either form of rot, i.e., dry-rationalistic or wet-fideistic.

Modern liberalism is a loose affiliation of people who have either wet or dry rot, both intellectually and spiritually. Deepak Chopra, for example, is a quintessential case of wet rot, but the entire liberal media also falls into this category. Most of liberal academia suffers from wet rot -- we are speaking of the humanities, of course. Conversely, a scientistic academic such as Richard Dawkins might as well be the poster child for dry rot.

Man is situated in a hierarchically organized universe of meaning. This being the case, of course science is one vehicle for disclosing universal meaning on a particular level. But to suggest that science is in any way capable of disclosing the meaning of higher levels is the essence of postmodern barbarism: it is dry rot.

Here are some aphorisms that go to the problem of dry rot:

--To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions.

--Nothing proves more the limits of science than the scientist’s opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession.

Scientific ideas allow themselves to be easily depraved by coarse minds.

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be.

Science easily degrades into fools’ mythology (NGD).

Conversely, a creationist yahoo who insists the world is 6,000 years old is a quintessential case of wet rot. Here are some aphorisms that go to this type of rot:

--Nothing is more dangerous for faith than to frequent the company of believers. The unbeliever restores our faith.

--If the fool hears it said that Christianity has social consequences, he is quick to assume that it has socialistic consequences.

--Every Christian has been directly responsible for the hardening of some unbeliever's heart (ibid.).

Now, just as there is psychopathology -- obviously -- there is, and must be, what we shall call "logopathology," which entails a failure of intellect and of spirit. In short -- and this is the key -- there is Reason (i.e., logos) and Spirit (pneuma), and our task is to maintain openness to both realms, horizontal and vertical.

Conversely, to be intellectually and/or spiritually closed -- or closed off from logos and pneuma -- is the basis of cultural pathology -- of the kind of pathology that made a Hitler possible.

Humanity today is divided between individuals who are simple and hard like steel bullets and individuals who are soft and unformed like a bunch of dirty rags. --Dávila