What else can be said about Angels and Orwell? Or have I written myself into a corner again?
Well, one further point is that human intelligence, as great a thing as it is, is still pretty weak in the overall cosmic scheme of things. There's a reason why we not only so often get things wrong, but catastrophically so.
Human -- qua human -- intelligence has some defects that can't really be remedied except in a handful of cases, and it can take your whole life just to track down their names and addresses. Truly, they are freaks -- faculty members of their own elite university.
There's a communion of saints. There is also a communion of geniuses -- of fertile eggheads and lumen beings. Moreover, -- obviously -- these two converge: In a fiery intelligence the materials are not fused into a new alloy; they are integrated into a new element (Dávila).
Note that what I just said -- about the convergence of sanctity and brilliance -- is an example of a transtemporal truth that would make no sense whatsoever in the contemporary university. If would be rejected out of hand as not even wrong.
Which means that in the very place where intelligent people supposedly congregate, these folkers don't even know the first thing about intelligence, i.e., what it is and whence it comes. Thus, the intellectual community of the modern university unwittingly reflects the following ironyclad aphorism:
Intelligence isolates; stupidity brings together.
It cannot be sufficiently stressed how anti-intellectual this is: not just unintelligent, but opposed to intelligence:
Modern philosophy, in rejecting the intelligence, has rejected the cornerstone of the whole edifice of continuity and progress in the universe (Sheen).
Ever wonder why progressives can't help but be so backward in their thinking? Because they violate the principle that renders progress possible.
Another key point -- this one also a bit ironic -- is that everyone believes in angels, and can't help believing in angels. However, the left does so implicitly, while assuming the function of angelic intelligence -- i.e., they claim to know things that only an angelic intellect could know.
This is a somewhat subtle point, or maybe my intelligence just isn't sufficiently angelic to explain it. But according to Sheen, modern philosophy has, in ideal,
given man an angelic intelligence, and thus has broken continuity with the lower orders; in fact, it has given man a degenerate sense knowledge, and has broken continuity with the higher orders.
This explains so much about the metaphysical absurdity of the left, that it makes me want to slap yo' mama and my angel at the same time. On the one hand, modern philosophy insists on cosmic continuity (as must any philosophy). But it situates the continuity "below," thereby dragging down the very intelligence that posits and transcends it.
In short, there is surely a temporal "evolution" in the cosmos, but only because it is ontologically posterior to an atemporal involution -- or to the timeless hierarchical structure of things; absent this structure, then, well, nothing.
Continuity and unity; or time and space, respectively. Now, no one posits one without the other, since it is not possible to do so. But this doesn't stop them from trying, which is precisely what, say, an "angelic scientism" is: an oxymoronic orthodoxy.
In other words, scientism (or metaphysical Darwinism, or leftoid neo-Marxism) reduces human intelligence to the animal or material while elevating it to a grand unified synthesis of reality. This represents a kind of infracosmic stupidity of which there can be no stupider.
Conversely, the sanctified intelligence of a St. Thomas
is constantly recurring to the principle of unification that runs through the universe.... For him the principle of unification is valid only on condition that there is no subordination of the higher to the lower order.
Unification is and must be from above; if it is from below, that's not unification, that's agglomeration and/or annihilation. I suppose it's a kind of unity, in that it turns your head into a desolate parking lot, but so what? Nothing is that stupid, let alone everything.
Is life higher than matter? Is mind higher than life? Modern philosophy, left to its own resources and principles, can only say Nah.
Now, the angelic intelligence can see God, and is therefore not in need of arguments to "prove" his existence. Analogously, no one has to use logic to convince me that the swimming pool I'm looking at is real. Indeed, in this context, any argument for the existence of the pool is weaker than my simply seeing it (let alone swimming in it). Merely reasoning about its existence is a defect, or at least rooted in one.
The same principle applies to... to everything. In no persons short of God is there perfect correlation of knowledge and essence, or intelligence and intelligibility.
But for us the perfection is on a continuum, e.g., from facts to conclusions to knowledge to prudence to wisdom. Is it controversial to suggest that hordes of intelligent people are bereft of wisdom, or that a faulty intelligence can misappropriate facts with diabolical facility?
It's getting late. We'll end with a passage by Sheen followed by an aphorism:
Without the intelligence there can be no continuity and no fluidity in the universe.... Discard the intelligence and you create a gap in the universe that no instinct or imaginal can fill.... Recognize the intelligence and you have a harmonious progression of perfections reaching even to God himself. Posit intelligence, and evolution becomes intelligible; deny it, and it becomes absurd.
The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.
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