From Breezy Aphorisms Windy Posts Blow

Thursdays are the one morning I have a hard break in my verticality and must yield to horizontal duties, so it’s better not to start what I can't finish. 

Fortunately, I still have Orthodoxy sitting open on my desk, and Chesterton is so aphoristic that one can pick him up and put him away at any point. Each aphorism can stand alone or provoke a whole essay.

For example, both reason and religion are “methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.” Boom. I could stop right there, but let's flesh it out a bit.

These two are not the only alternatives, and indeed, there is a third factor at play that is implicitly present in both, and which lifts man out of absurcularity, AKA, the intellect. 

Call it what you want, but there is an X-factor at play in the soul that is discontinuous with any linear account, and infinitely — literally — transcends what is situated below it, whether logic, the senses, the passions, or the material ego. 

Schuon writes that reason

is not, like pure intellect, formless and fluid light; true, it derives its implacability, or its validity in general, from the intellect, but it touches on essences only through drawing conclusions, not by direct vision; it is indispensable for verbal formulation but it does not involve immediate knowledge.

That was a mouthful. It implies that where logic is formal, intellect is formless; where logic is static, intellect is fluid; the former illuminates while the latter partakes of the light itself; one touches, the other sees; one is verbal, the other experiential. 

This is not in any way to devalue reason, only to say that to reduce the intellect to logic makes man a machine. And the whole point of Gödel’s proofs is that they prove man is not a machine, and that we have access to a realm of truth that can never be proved with mere logic.

Be reasonable. Better yet, be intelligent, because not only can reason mislead, it is often designed to do so. Think, for example, of those climate change models that are perfectly reasonable. So long as you accept the insane variables. Schuon:  

Reason is not Intelligence in itself, it is only its instrument, and this on the express condition that it be inspired by intellectual Intuition, or simply correct ideas or exact facts; nothing is worse than the mind cut off from its root….

Nothing? You heard the man. Name one thing more destructive than the Bad Idea rigorously pursued to its end. At this very moment we are living such pure destructiveness. The ideas of the left are bad enough, but imagine they couldn’t be arrested eleven days hence, and were permitted to arrive at their telos! A plague with no antibiotics.

Speaking of bios, Whitehead once remarked that biology is the study of the small organisms while cosmology is the study of the big ones. I wouldn’t say the cosmos is literally an organism, but it certainly displays organismic features, but this isn’t because it is alive but because God is. Thus, we might say that theology is the study of the biggest organism, or rather, the ground, source, and possibility of organismic wholeness and interiority. 

In case that wasn’t clear, allow Schuon shed some additional obscurity on the subject:

Existence is a reality in some respects comparable to a living organism; it cannot with impunity be reduced, in man’s consciousness and in his modes of action, to proportions that do violence to its nature; pulsations of the “extra-rational” pass through it from every quarter.

Pulsations? Is that what these are? Yes, because being as such is nourished, so to speak, by veins and arteries that ascend and descent the cosmos. Indeed, you couldn’t understand a word I’m saying if this weren't the case, as proved by our trolls.

Not to get sidetracked into a somewhat different subject, but what is prayer but God taking a ride on an artery and us taking a return trip in a vein? This is the Great Circle of Being, but in no way does it enclose us, because it’s an open spiral. If it’s not, then I’ve spent the last 17 years of blogging getting better at nothing. 

Now religion and all forms of supra-rational wisdom belong to this extra-rational order, the presence of which we observe around us, unless we are blinded by a mathematician’s prejudice; to attempt to treat existence as a purely arithmetical and physical reality is to falsify it in relation to ourselves and within ourselves, and in the end it is to blow it to pieces (ibid.).

In reality, there are intelligent and unintelligent ways of being intelligent. Some people say that our elite managerial class is entirely composed of the intelligent unintelligent, but that’s an obvious exaggeration, since it leaves out the unintelligent unintelligence of the Woke.

If this post proves nothing else, it shows how one aphorism can so quickly get out of hand. No time even to spielcheck.