Hidden in Plain Sight

Continuing with yesterday's post, the intellect is bound by two horizons -- like sea and sky -- that shade off into obscurity.  BUT

Let us not confuse the obscurity that dominates the frontiers of intelligibility from on high with that which is beneath them (Garrigou-Lagrange).

In other words, don't confuse the sea with the sky, and whatever you do, don't conflate them. Nor is a sailboat suitable for flight. 

Looked at one way, transcendence and immanence are complementary, but as with all complementarities, one must be prior, and it is inconceivable that transcendence could come from below. A purely immanent world could never know it was one. The leap from existence to experience is literally infinite, to say nothing of the release from instinct to freedom and truth.

Nevertheless, a degree of obscurity necessarily abides at both ends, which is why we humans refer to the spiritual world as "immaterial," whereas Petey, -- with his quasi-infallible transcendental view of things -- refers to our material world as "subspiritual" 

Now, as we are bound by these two obscurities, "there are also two clarities of a contrary nature -- true clarity and the false clarity," and you had better know which is which. 

To jump ahead a bit, the crude sophistry of the village atheist is the last word in false clarity. It is totally clear, as anyone with an IQ above room temperature can fully comprehend it. The same is true of any form of ideological literalism from antireligious scientism to religious fundamentalism. Around here we just call it ismism.

The root error of false clarity is the pretense of explaining the superior by means of the inferior. Why pretend it is possible to accomplish this? Because on the one hand man loves truth, but the benighted ismist attempts to know the intellectual object of a higher level with the means of a lower one which eclipses it, precisely. 

Thus,

those who pride themselves the most on their objectivity are precisely those who most lack the superior sort of objectivity, which.... leads them to prefer to the superior sort of clarity the inferior sort of clarity, which becomes false due to the importance they unduly give to it.

Which is why metaphysics is both more objective and true than those lesser sciences that study this or that limited and contingent object. Conversely, metaphysics illuminates those principles that cannot not be; and to say that they are necessary is to say they are eternal. Thus,

It is immensely important to distinguish the clarity of what is purely and simply true and that of what is true only in a secondary and partial aspect, all the while being essentially false.

This or that science surely discloses truth on the plane appropriate to its object and method. But this very truth can be "placed in the service of the false doctrine that diverts that [truth] from its end. In such a false doctrine, truth is the slave of error" (emphasis mine).

For example, evolutionary psychology illuminates a great deal about man. But to suggest that natural selection explains everything about the human station is but a blindingly false clarity -- and indeed a form of slavery. 

Why slavery? Because the superior is thereby constrained by what is properly subordinate to it, like a retarded child ruling over the adults. But enough about Joe Biden.

Garrigou-Lagrange says goodbye to this chapter with a passage from a 19th century mystic-theologian with the unlikely name of Ernest Hello:

The language of the great contemplatives is hand-to-hand combat with things that cannot be spoken.... Colliding in its flight with ineffable secrets, with unrevealed mysteries, it has the appearance of an eagle who... arrives in regions where, even for it, there is no longer suitable air for breathing. Thoughts are lacking for it. Their intellect descends again, struggling against words, which fail, each in their own turn....

In this ascent..., all lights are shadows in comparison with the last light. The treasuries into which the great contemplative's gaze searches are forever inexhaustible; and eternity promises to their ever-renewed joy fresh springs that will never be exhausted.

We thank thee, Father, that thou hast hidden these things from the tenured and revealed them to the humble Raccoon!