A Nation of (Vertical) Immigrants

Horizontal movement would mean little if it weren't bisected by the vertical tension we've been discussing in recent posts. America was settled by people who weren't just interested in physical space, but in a vertical space where they would be free to encounter God in ways not defined and enforced by the state.

As John Adams observed, the horizontal revolution of 1776 was preceded by a vertical revolution that had occurred a generation before. Even Jefferson pleaded for the assistance of “that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them” in this new world. He further proposed a design for the Great Seal of the U.S. depicting "the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night."

As Novak writes in his On Two Wings, revolutionary era Americans "did not believe that time is cyclical, going nowhere, spinning in circles pointlessly. They believed that history had a beginning and was guided by providence for a purpose":

Time (in the view of the founders) was created for the unfolding of human liberty, for human emancipation.

Regarding the vertical movement -- AKA exodus -- how do we know which way is which, i.e., up from down? Is this in fact a relativistic universe, or has the left always been the vanguard of intrinsic metacosmic error?

History is a record of progress (or decline), measured by permanent standards, God's standards, as learned from and tested by long experience (Novak, emphasis mine).

So, it is possible that the left isn't in error. But only if there exist no permanent standards and transcendent truths by which to judge their ideological pronouncements. How convenient.

History, for the founders, is "open, purposive, contingent in liberty." It

is not a Greek or Roman idea. It is Hebraic.... Probably most of the humans who had ever lived before the arrival of Judaism on the world stage never even heard of "progress".... For Jews and Christians, by contrast, history is heading somewhere new...

All of this is of course bound up with the nature of time: what is it? We've already alluded to Judeo-Christian time, so we won't belabor the point. There is also pre-Hebraic time. We won't belabor that point either. Suffice it to say that pagan time is circular and backward looking, toward a mythic golden age. It is gnostalgic, ordered to a paradisal time before time, about which they are half correct. For in the words of the Aphorist,

The error lies not in dreaming that secret gardens exist, but in dreaming that they have gates.

This much we can know with certainty in this life: the gate is the direction and the direction is the gate. Before Abraham was I AM surely is, and I AM is Truth, Way, Door, Bread, Life, Light, Vine, Shepherd, Resurrection.

But Liberals describe a past that never existed and predict a future that is never realized. Which explains why The liberal mentality is an angelic visitor impervious to earthly experiences. (NGD).

In the words of Petey, the left invents the past it needs in order to justify the impossible future it desires. Moreover, the present crimes of the left are purified of their criminality by the angels of Good Intention.

Back to our permanent exodus. Recall what Novak says above about history being contingent in liberty. In other words, if history is contingent -- and it is -- this is because liberty is necessary. This is a somewhat paradoxical formulation, because we normally think of liberty as that which is free of constraint. It is the necessary condition of our own contingent choices.

Here we must draw a distinction between freedom as such, which is necessary, and what we do with our freedom, which is contingent. There is a distant analogy with God, who is radically free, and yet, "constrained," so to speak, by his own nature -- by love, truth, beauty, goodness, etc. Man too is free and constrained, such that the highest expression of freedom is in conformity with the will of God -- quintessentially so in Jesus, but also in Mary, in whom obedience and freedom converge in one big YES.

"Liberty is the axis of the universe, the ground of the possibility of love, human and divine" (Novak). It is the vertical axis, although it obviously plays out and is prolonged in the horizontal. It very much reminds me of another aphorism, that

The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

In other words, man qua man, the individual person, doesn't only exist in the tension between immanence and transcendence, he is this tension. Thus, for God, there are only individuals relating -- or not -- to him in this bidirectional space.

The antagonism comes into play with man (man as such as opposed to such-and-such a man), symbolized by the fall and expressed historically in more ways than can possibly be chronicled: in ideology, identity politics, racism (and racialism), superstition, scapegoating, projection, envy, hatred, et al.

It's not possible to neatly wrap up a post like this. We'll end with some remarks by Voegelin and let you sort it all out:

the very idea that there is a humanity, that there is a mankind, and that one can generalize about man, appears only when certain revelatory insights occur. These are spiritual outbursts.... Only when spiritual insights are attained does man become defined as that being who receives his order through existence from God.

There is therefore a tremendous importance attaching to these spiritual outbursts and insights. The recipients of such insights act as representatives of humanity, with the obligation to communicate their insights to all mankind.... every new insight into order is the beginning of a revolution of more or less considerable dimensions.

In this context, conservatives who specifically wish to conserve the revolutionary insights of the founders are the radicals, while progressive leftists are the backward looking reactionaries. Advocates of these Gnostic and totalitarian movements "feel themselves to be the representatives of mankind, and they feel everyone must be converted to the representative type of truth."

Or face cancellation and exile, which is the shadow of exodus.

As inversions of the archangel in the Bible, Marxist archangels prevent men from fleeing their paradises. --Dávila