No Order, No Peace

Again, we're just flippin' through Fr. Reginald's The Order of Things -- and who doesn't want to know how and why things are ordered the way they are? Indeed, you could say that this is the whole business of life -- the business of isness. 

What do I mean by this bold claim? Well, science -- obviously -- is all about the discovery of order at every level of investigation, from physics to chemistry to biology on up. Politics is essentially the science of our collective order, while economics goes to the order of goods and services. As a clinical psychologist, my racket revolves around emotional and cognitive order and dis-disorder. 

The horizontal order of the lower sciences is bisected by a vertical order that extends from and to God -- or, if you prefer a less saturated pneumaticon, O. 

This vertical order is as self-evident as is the horizontal; and when I say "self-evident," I mean that our intellect assents to the proposition the moment it is adequately articulated and understood, unless successfully undermined by crosscurrent factors such as willfulness, intellectual dishonesty, pride, craziness, tenure, or simple stupidity.

For example, we begin -- must begin -- with the senses. We see, touch, hear, smell, or taste the world. But the most perfect sense imaginable doesn't reach the order of intelligibility. My dog's sense of smell is orders of magnitude superior to mine, but she cannot reflect upon the object of the senses and know that she is in contact with an intelligible world.

Which, among other reasons, is why natural selection can never be a sufficient reason for the human intellect. Suffice it to say that an eternity of material shuffling can never attain immateriality. 

Analogously, you could touch or smell every book ever written, but it would not disclose the immaterial meaning of a single word. Nor would every journalist stacked one atop the other add up to a single wise man.

To put it another way, the object of the senses is a subset of the object of the intellect, which is intelligible being. We know this -- and cannot help knowing it -- but an animal does not know it and can never know it. 

To summarize: objects of the senses are objects of the senses, but the object of the intellect is intelligible being, AKA everyTHING and EVERYthing -- the One and the Many, the latter resolving into the former, on pain of an eternally absurd mayaplicity.

I want to flip forward to a chapter that asks the question: The Finality and Realism of the Will: Does the Desire for Happiness Prove God's Existence?

Let's check it out: I want to be happy. Therefore God exists. 

Yup. 

But let's break it down and try to be more specific. Happiness, for example. What is it? It must be an end, but of what? It depends. 

For example, we can all agree that the proper end of the intellect is truth. Attaining it -- accompanied by that subtle clicking noise you hear with your third ear -- should make your thinking part happy. Indeed, it is downright addictive.

Likewise, the proper object of the will is the good. Everyone this side of academia knows that our Prime Directive is to do good and avoid evil. 

So both intellect and will are teleologically ordered. If they weren't, they wouldn't just be dis-ordered but utterly meaningless and absurd. Nihilism, Dude. Truth would be anything you wish it to be, and morality would be reduced to desire. Yes, you would be sealed in leftism, with no way out.

It reminds me of how, when someone dies, it is customary to say "rest in peace." Analogously, the intellect is at peace when it can rest in truth. But you will have noticed how restless is the intellect. This restlessness results in a kind of endless mischief, unless it rests in O. Then the restlessness will be ordered to its final end, and we can enjoy some peace & quiet upstairs.

We all see how this works with desire. We all want stuff, but we also see that no amount of finite stuff can fill that hole: 

It is impossible for man to find true happiness, which he naturally desires, in any limited good, for his intellect, immediately noting THE LIMITATION of this good, then conceives a superior good, and the will naturally desires it (ibid.).  

Yes, this has even happened to me. Come to think of it -- and an earlier version of myself -- too much satiety can even provoke a kind of "distress and disgust" --  which I'll bet underlies a lot of the irrational hatred of capitalism -- as if freedom is the problem rather than dis-ordered desire!

It is as if the intellect says:

"Now that you have attained this sensible delight, which just a moment ago was attractive to you, you can now see that it is poverty itself and incapable of satisfying the profound void found in your heart, something incapable of responding to your desire for happiness" (ibid.).

Poverty itself. I like that. Analogously, go back to what was said about the proper object of the intellect. You can try to pacify it with some ideology such as scientism, socialism, or feminism, but each is Intellectual Poverty Itself. You'll still be hungry, but you'll blame Trump, or the patriarchy, or white Christians, or something.

Fr. Reginald poses the question: 

Can it be the case that a NATURAL desire would be vain, chimerical, senseless, and without any real scope?

Be careful how you respond -- or at least be prepared to live with the consequences -- because if your answer is Yes, then what you want is absurd, nothing is true, and surely neither will make you happy. 

In reality, one proof of God is the desire for something less. We could also say that it's a good practice to live for the present moment and for eternity, not for that old deceiver, Time. 

To be perfectly clear, what I mean is to live for the limited moment bisected by limitless eternity, and time will take care of itself. Hidden springs and subtle pleasures abound here, and the thirst is quenched long before the water ever runs dry.

Peace is "the tranquility of order," so there is peace when we are ordered to our proper end.

No Order, No Peace. The End.