If Truth Evolves, It Isn't

Lotta durned innarestin' questions raised by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange in this here new translation of his The Philosophy of Being and the Development of Doctrine. I'm only into the first 34 pages, but so far it's a purt' good story. Made me cogitate to beat the band. Parts anyway. 

Just one thing: does he have to use s'many Latin words?

As we know, one of the perennial cosmic heresies of the left is historicism. This term has a number of connotations, but the focus here is on the idea that all truth claims are historically conditioned and cannot be understood outside their historo-cultural matrix. Here we arrive at hell's bottom: birthplace of such twisted ideologies as multiculturalism, moral relativism, deconstruction, CRT, et al. 

Like all heresies, historicism takes a perfectly useful  and even trivial partial truth but expands it all out of proportion -- as is true of any ideology, say the Barbaric Larcenous Marxists of BLM. If these criminal retards and political psychopaths were only defending the proposition that race has no bearing on a person's natural rights, we'd be right there along side them protesting. 

Hell, if blacks were truly being denied their natural and civil rights, we'd even go so far as to join them in protesting with guns, bombs, arson, and other mostly peaceful means.

Anyway, the underlying issue G-L addresses here "is the historical contextualization of all truth claims." At the extreme other end of historicism (here in Celestial Central) is the proposition that the most important moral, political, and philosophical truths are timeless, universal, and self-evident; they are "in the nature of things" -- a nature that includes the human person -- and are accessible to any person in all conceivable times and places. Where one happens to find oneself thrown into history has nothing to do with it.

"A metaphysical doctrine," writes Schuon, "is the mental incarnation of a universal truth." Conversely leftist ideology is the emotional incarnation of a universal lie. Marxism, for example, denies the Absolute while privileging its own counterfeit absoluteness; likewise the diabolical doctrine of anti-racism, which would imply that, say, Obama, is 50% victim and 50% oppressor of himself.

I know what you're thinking: the Progressive Savior is a hypostatic union of perfect Victim and perfect Oppressor, having two complete and distinct natures at once. Although he is Victim and Oppressor, yet Obama is not two, but the One we've been waiting for.

A moment's reflection will tell you that our quintessential transhistoricism is one of the bases of our value and dignity, i.e., our consciousness of the Absolute and all this both presumes and entails. 

For example, what sort of being is potentially conformed to the Absolute? Only human beings, hence the literally infinite divide between man and beast (notwithstanding the equally obvious continuities). 

Likewise, in what sort of cosmos is this mysterious adequation of intellect to intelligibility even possible? The number of cosmic coincidences needed to render this reality possible makes the whole scheme look suspiciously con-spiratorial (in the literal sense of "breathing together," or even where threegather).

Schuon: "Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supraterrestrial character of his destiny."

Come to think on it, "One of the keys to the understanding of our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world never measure up to the real range of our intelligence" (FS) -- which is another way of saying that all ideologies are self-imposed means of enclosing the intellect behind a grid of crisscrossing bars of stupidity and pride; or maybe envy and ingratitude; or perhaps journalism and tenure.

With regard to these ideological grids, "The world scatters us, and the ego compresses us; God gives us recollection and dilates us..." (ibid.). 

Dilation is required for any birth, whether the first or second. 

Another way of looking at historicism is to say that it is intrinsically peripheral, in the sense that there is no earthly hope of finding -- much less abiding -- in the Center. But this is the whole point! Put conversely, it takes a foolsgold-plated nihilist to maintain that the point of life is pointlessness. 

Schuon: "In order to be happy, man must have a center; now, this center is above all the certitude of the One. The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandonment of the soul to the caprices of the periphery. To be man is to be at the center; it is to be the center" (as in O <-> ʘ).

Speaking of centers, let's get back to ours, i.e., the book. G-L agrees that "there are fundamental metaphysical principles constituting the ground of enduring dogmatic truth, that people know without need for study. These principles allow dogmatic propositions to be ontologically understandable by all..."

Yes, but... some aspects of doctrine are a little difficult to swallow, and not just communion. Are such things really common sense? 

Yes -- we suspect -- if only we go back and down far enough to first principles; the question is "whether the Church has been given a knowable, propositionally enunciable deposit of faith" which is neither myth nor metaphysics per se, while not denying their importance to the imagination and intellect in unpacking and assimilating them -- in making them fruitful. For man is more than just his intellect; he is also body, passion, creativity, love, freedom, etc. 

While the Christian doctrine surely develops in time, it does not do so in any historicist manner that would negate what went before; rather, with the passage of time the Church "does not know 'more' revealed realities, but rather knows more of what is (and was) present in the revealed realities" all along.

We might say that if the Truth "evolves," then it can't be. 

Look at me, ramblin' again. Retirement'll do that to a man, but I happen to know that another little post is already on the way, just waitin' to be born. I'll catch ya further on down the trail in the next e-pistle.