I'd Rather be a Mere Moth than a Dim Bulb

I'm going to highlight a few passages from Garrigou's The Sense of Mystery until one of them flips my light switch and veers off into a post. 

the theologian obeys the truth because the theologian loves the truth. Admittedly, the divine truth eludes easy explanation, but the fruits of its contemplation excel those of all other possible objects (Cuddy, from the Foreword).

This checks out. If you don't love truth, then it is something less, because truth and love are absolutely convergent. It is also fruitful, and endlessly so, because it is alive: so, to be perfectly accurate, Life, Love, and Truth are convergent, and their medium is light. Come to think of it, so too is their substance light, a light that proceeds in two directions.

What? Sorry -- I've jumped ahead into the book I'm currently reading, The Order of Things. 

In the introduction to the latter, Minerd (the translighter) points out that "the reader will notice the presence of a higher light" in Garrigou's words, a light one doesn't perceive or receive -- to put it mildly -- "in a philosopher who strives to write in a manner congenial to those not sharing that same supernatural light." This "makes certain demands of the reader regarding the light under which the text should be read."

The bottom line is that life is short, so any philosophy that doesn't convey this light isn't worth your time. 

For in reality, these intellectual aberrations aren't even philosophy. Rather, they're not only less than philosophy (AKA love of Wisdom), but separated by an abyss from the proper object of philosophy -- which is to say, intelligible being and the Being Who Is its cause, principle, and end.

Such pseudo-philosophies are literally intellectual disorders, since they are not ordered to their proper object -- similar to how, say, behaviorism can't be a psychology because it is ordered to behavior, not the psyche (or how feminism is not ordered to females, or leftism to reality).

A bit more from the latter book: Garrigou's works "are animated from the depths of his soul by a light that is loftier than that of 'pure reason alone.'" This too checks out. Me? Grandiose? Please. I am but a moth, but at least I know light when I'm circling it. 

Unlike his dim bulb father, my son won't have to waste a moment of his life on such foolish byways and frivolous diversions as materialism, existentialism, scientism, and all the rest. He hasn't only been given a head start on the vertical adventure, but a heart start to go with it. Lucky brat.

Trolls -- operating as they do in the dark -- will no doubt conflate this with some sort of top-down indoctrination, when it is precisely the opposite; or better, it is actually both-and, which is to say, an ascent from the world to principles, followed by an illumination of the world by those necessary and eternal principles.  

Failing this, "we are thereby reduced to a merely-horizontal view of things, making the loftiest truths descend to the same level as the most lamentable errors." To reduce our hierarchically ordered cosmos to matter or math or privilege or "power" is to reduce intelligence to invincible stupidity. 

Conversely, when we are receptive to the higher light and see things in their proper perspective, "we will have a vertical view of things according to the true scale of values -- from the Supreme Truth and Sovereign Good all the way down to the most distant ramblings of error and evil." 

Seen in this Light, error and evil are proof of the True and Good. 

"Consecration to the truth," says Garrigou, "is real, perennial, liberating, and salvific." If it weren't real, it couldn't set us free, now could it? Nor could it save. 

To say "perennial" is to say timeless and universal, so it is also quite obviously one. If it weren't, we could never know it, for our intelligence would thereby be plunged into an obscure multiplicity with no way up and out. We would be condemned to the Tyranny of Diversity, as in California.

A cosmos divided against it self cannot stand. Nor could we stand it, since dualism is repugnant to the intellect. Behind, beneath, and above the bifurcation of intelligence and intelligibility is the Eternal Intellection of the Plenitude of Being.

I'll just end with this thought by St. Thomas -- and let us moths be thankful he thought this way:

As it is better to illuminate than to shine only, so it is better to hand on to others what has been contemplated rather than to contemplate only.