[S]ometimes we wonder about an ideologue's resistance to rational argument. The alternative to life in the paradise of his dream is death in the hell of his banality (Voegelin).
Again, ideology elevates an otherwise banal life into an intense, readymade psychodrama. This explains how and why for people who already practice a genuine religion, political religions hold no allure.
Ideology and religion should be at vertical antipodes, but, just as ideology is a political religion, there's a great deal of dysfunctional religiosity that is more ideological than religious in the proper sense of the term (political Islam being only the loudest example).
Human existence necessarily takes place in the presence -- no, it is this Presence -- of a luminous, flowing, and expanding cruciform space between immanence and transcendence.
So long as you live, this is where you are, no matter how much you may deny it. We are only humanly alive in the Truth of this Presence (and Presence of Truth), and this Presence has a distinct structure. It's not just a blank epiphenomenon of the laws of physics, but the place where physics literally comes to light in the unending quest to explore and discover reality.
Nevertheless, the ideologue "tries to pull the timeless into identity with the time of his existence" via "the dream act of forcing the two poles into oneness" (ibid.).
For example -- speaking of physics -- note how scientism is but the perverse use of scientific findings to deny the possibility of the scientific knower, up to an including Intellect itsoph. Science become ideology is called scientism, which is just another dysfunctional religion, no more genuine than Nancy Pelosi's "Catholicism" or Joe Biden's... you know, the thing.
The flow of Presence mentioned above isn't time, nor is it in time (or time alone). If it were solely in time, then we could never know it, because to know it is to transcend it.
It's difficult to speak of these things without sounding cutely paradoxical, but I'm actually trying to be as literal as I can be. I'm in the space right now (as are you, uncomprehending trolls excepted), simply describing what's going on experientally within the contours of this pleasantly lit space. And suffice it to say that Voegelin is never being cute:
I shall use the term presence to denote the point of intersection in man's existence; and the term flow of presence to denote the dimension of existence that is, and is not, time.
Correct: the ideologue is in need of a cosmological plumber in order to unblock and open up the vertical pipe that connects him to O. This is the legendary "golden pipe" that Toots Mondello would speak of when he'd had a few too many. It also reminds us of an Aphorism which we will allow to speak for its elf, since we have only ten minutes left this morning:
The sewers of history sometimes overflow, as in our time.
But while looking up that aphorism, I was reminded of these:
History is the series of universes present to the consciousness of successive subjects.
Precisely. Which, by the way, goes to the depraved and dysfunctional historical understanding of our contemporary iconoclasts.
History is not cleared of its miasmas except in the brief periods in which Christian winds blow.
A slight exaggeration, unless you recognous with the Fathers that the Logos is and has always been here (albeit not necessarily in the flesh), and is the source of all truth of any kind.
That's all the time we have left for the Presence. Tomorrow we won't be as ontologically squeezed.
3 comments:
Why do ideologues cling to their ideology despite its proven failures?
Indeed. Trying to control the coronavirus by taking away our liberties will only lead to failure, as history irreconcilably demonstrates. We must roll with manmade disasters, like the peaceful leaf on the stormy sea just minding its own business, because disasters are actually not manmade. It was God all along. Unless somebody says the left caused it and then it will have been the left all along.
Because God is punishing the left by punishing the right for allowing the left, despite the right.
And so thus, I can only see a ruthlessly godless communist government in our future, made mostly of mad leftists and misguided rightists trying to gain power for the ultimate purpose of trying to control God. But God cannot be controlled. God shall destroy you all.
Here endeth my sermon of Truth.
History is not cleared of its miasmas except in the brief periods in which Christian winds blow.
A passage we read last fall comes to mind, describing a journey through Normandy and France in the mid- 900s:
"It was pretty much the same through the whole journey, waste lands, marshes, and forests alternated. The Castles stood on high mounds frowning on the country round, and villages were clustered round them, where the people either fled away, driving off their cattle with them at the first sight of an armed band, or else, if they remained, proved to be thin, wretched-looking creatures, with wasted limbs, aguish faces, and often iron collars round their necks. Wherever there was anything of more prosperous appearance, such as a few cornfields, vineyards on the slopes of the hills, fat cattle, and peasantry looking healthy and secure, there was sure to be seen a range of long low stone buildings, surmounted with crosses, with a short square Church tower rising in the midst, and interspersed with gnarled hoary old apple-trees, or with gardens of pot-herbs spreading before them to the meadows. If, instead of two or three men-at-arms from a Castle, or of some trembling serf pressed into the service, and beaten, threatened, and watched to prevent treachery, the King asked for a guide at a Convent, some lay brother would take his staff; or else mount an ass, and proceed in perfect confidence and security as to his return homewards, sure that his poverty and his sacred character would alike protect him from any outrage from the most lawless marauder of the neighbourhood."
Most of all this is all about keeping the mob under control so they don’t storm the wrong castle. I'd rather they just go to church on Sundays. But the current strategy has been to keep the mob squabbling amongst themselves. I fear they’re starting to figure this out.
So I consider the EPA. Sometimes it’s needed to keep people healthy and alive, and other times, to keep the mindlessly quarter profit driven corporations solvent. But a lot of the time it’s a real pain in everyone’s butt. Plus it’s a leftist thing. Damn that tricky Nixon straight to hell.
So if we abolish the EPA, the lawyers, many rich and powerful, will litigate loudly. Regulate the EPA and the EPA will cry “Regulation? We do the regulation! Not you, you dumb fuckers.” Take your eye off the EPA and corruption will infiltrate and you get many back room deals meant to enrich all the players and only the players.
Yet in the words of those plastic red hatted aphorists, “If a problem comes along, you must whip it!” No truer words badly sung. So what to do? Is now a good time for a thought experiment?
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