Pure Land Dudeism

I've been slowly making my way through Garrigou's Three Ages of the Spiritual Life, -- and this is not the sort of book one rushes through -- but decided to jump ahead to chapter XXVI, on The Active Purification of the Intellect, because it touches on so much of what's going on with the left's free fall into mass psychosis. 

Purification of the intellect. On the one hand, this title makes no sense in a post-reality world. Then again, what is going on in our world but an obsession with impure thoughts? -- whether these filthy thoughts are of Speedy Gonzalez, Pepe Le Pew, Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, or even worse? 

To say man is to say God, such that man as such cannot not be religious. It's just a matter of how bad the religion, and it is difficult to get worse than leftism, at least on a widescale basis. 

I just heard the shout of a hundred million amens! echoing up from the 20th century. Yes, I hear dead people; and if everyone could hear them, no one would be a leftist. 

In another context, Chesterton spoke of a "democracy of the dead," meaning that, if we wish to be scrupulously fair, we should regard being alive at the moment a mere accident. Real social justice extends to our illustrious forebears, without whom we'd be like any other shithole country.

Why, for example, should we not respect the wishes of the founders, or of those who died in the civil war? I challenge the left to locate a single one of them who thought he was defending the country from cartoon characters that might hurt the feelings of college educated white women of both sexes and all races. 

I'm pretty sure the guys who fought World War 2 didn't think the goal was to make the US safe for fascism and totalitarianism. What an insult to their heroism, their intelligence, and their basic sanity. 

Our point is that the most dreadfully impure thoughts ooze from people who would reject on principle the idea that purification of the intellect is mandatory if you wish to think properly, let alone if you presume to force others to think in the SJW Approved Way.

We begin -- as anyone with a vestige of self-awareness must begin -- with the principle of Original Sin. To be perfectly accurate, we shouldn't call it a principle; rather, in our view, Original Sin is a quasi-mythic formulation of a principial reality. Nevertheless, if appreciated and situated in its proper context, it will more than do the job. Just don't be a hubristic jackass, okay? 

In short, "man's intellect is wounded." Having said that, our Protestant friends go too far in the other direction, claiming that the wound is mortal and that to believe otherwise is to fall into the sin of pride. In short, they lower the bar of hubris to the ground.  

In this latter scheme, God provides us with revelation because we have no natural ability to understand what's what. Moreover, we must accept the revelation on faith, again, because our minds are too decimated by sin to reach the truth. To extend the baseball analogy, revelation shows us how to get home despite the fact that, left to our own devices, we can never get to first.

The reality is somewhere in between, i.e., between wounded and dead. Yes, the wound can become mortal, but that's on us. Only we can kill our own intellect, although doing a thorough job of it will set you back 50k a year, or whatever it costs to attend an elite university these days.

Anyway, here is our cosmic situation, nor do I want to minimize the gravity of the wound:

the intellect, instead of inclining spontaneously toward the true, and especially toward supreme Truth, has difficulty attaining it and tends to become absorbed in the consideration of earthly things without rising to their cause.

Is this not true? 

Of course it is true. Moreover, the intellect -- our most precious gift, mind you -- 

is inclined with curiosity toward ephemeral things and, on the other hand, it is negligent and slothful in the search for our true last end and the means leading to it.

As a consequence, the intellect not only "easily falls into error" but "may finally reach the state that is called spiritual blindness," or worse, spiritual wokeness. For truly, just as there is nothing so dead as a "living constitution," there is no one as somnolent as a wide awoke assoul.

So, revelation is given to man as a kind of aide-mémoire -- which is to say, a vertical aide. However, we are not totally lost without it, nor could the divine message even resonate in us if we were. 

Rather, with time and effort (and aptitude) the intellect "can even acquire, without the help of revelation, the knowledge of a certain number of fundamental truths..." 

Nevertheless -- you will have noticed -- "few men are capable of this labor, and they reach this result only after a considerable length of time," not to mention "without succeeding in freeing themselves from all error." 

My son, for example, knows things at 15 that I didn't know until [too embarrassed to say]. Thus, he has a multi-decade head start, but even then, he'll never be omniscient. Unless I get there first and pass along the secret.

There's a helpful footnote at the bottom of the page reminding us that "thanks to divine revelation," the "truths of religion can be known by all, quickly, with a firm certitude, and without any admixture of errors." 

Here again, revelation reveals a vertical shortcut; on the one hand it tells us about the end, but on the other, this is only the beginning (of our vertical adventure). 

This post is getting too long, so, to be continued.