Everyone likes it when I bring in Chesterton. Or maybe when I leave out Bob. Like Dávila he was a brilliant aphorist, but the style is quite different.
Where Dávila’s are sharp and implosive, Chesterton's are broad and exuberant; likewise, both are funny, but Dávila is tartly ironic, with a bitter half-smile, where Chesterton is a joyous pie in the face of our pseudo-intellectual betters.
I admit that your explanation explains a great deal, but what a great deal it leaves out!
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it…
And "How much happier you would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos,” leaving you “free like other men to look up as well as down!”
Ever notice how debating a progressive or
Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.
I’m old enough to remember when our ideological adversaries exhibited “the combination of an expansive reason with a contracted common sense” instead of an absence of both reason and common sense. It’s Brandon and Fetterman all the way down: Branderwomen.
Like materialism, postmodernism “has a sort of insane simplicity.” Simply accept its first premise and you "have at once the sense of covering everything and leaving everything out.”
As we’ve mentioned before, this is a kind of inverse or inside-out omniscience that literally knows everything about nothing; for it “understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding.”
But we'd rather be a small nephesh in a big cosmos than a big macher in a small one.
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist. A macher is just Yiddish for “big shot.” And Nephesh is Hebrew for the soul, describing "a part of mankind that is immaterial, like one's mind, emotions, will, intellect, personality, and conscience” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephesh]).
Excerpt it’s hardly a matter of preference, rather, of 20/∞ insight. Nor -- obviously -- are we talking about the physical cosmos, rather, the whole existentialada, up and down, inside and out, subject and object, vertical and horizontal, celestial and terrestrial, heaven and earth.
In any event, you can’t have a metaphysic that explains the pond while unexplaining the nefesh swimming in it: “if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk.”
And the same folks are likely to regard religion as somehow limiting. Which is like calling speech a limitation on animality, or intelligence a limitation on instinct, or natural law a limitation on freedom.
Thomistic realism, because it is the height of sanity and common sense, begins in the senses. However, it differs with materialism in that it doesn’t end there: “The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane…”
But what is sanity? What is mental health -- or cognitive or spiritual health?
Easy: the conformity of mind to reality, bearing in mind that reality is not a blob but a hierarchy, so conformity to matter is not conformity to spirit.
Yesterday we spoke of the cosmic circle with concentric circles around the central point (which is not so much dimensionless as beyond dimension). To simplify, we could say that God is at the center surrounded by theology, which is surrounded by metaphysics and philosophy, which is in turn surrounded by science.
Conversely, if matter is at the center, there is no center and no one to know it. We will get back to this subject after we've finished plagiaphrasing Orthodoxy for all it’s worth.
Principles. They do exist, and we are always arguing toward or from them. Problem is, our adversaries argue from implicit and unexamined principles that always reduce to absurdity and contradiction -- for example, that we don’t know what a woman is, except she has a right to choose, except for female babies, who have no choice but to be aborted, for example, if the parents don't want a girl. Whatever that is.
The man who begins to think without proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end.
And let’s not even talk about the women. Since we don’t know what they are.
Above we alluded to 20/∞ insight. Not a joke, man. For the normal man's
spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.
Except it’s actually more than two pictures, as implied by “∞,” which is to say, Infinitude.
There are many ways we can conceptualize this, all the way up to the Principial realm itself, where God has perfect Absolute/Infinite transvision.
Down here it manifests in a variety of ways, such as form/substance, left and right cerebral hemispheres, male/female, spirit and letter. The list is… maybe not infinite, but more than I want to detail here because you get the point, which is that we can’t contain the uncontainable. Nevertheless
The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious.
Which is not to be confused with the proper mystic who “allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid."
This is literally the case because, as we’ve mentioned before, the very same Principle accounts for the intelligibility of everything even while nothing whatsoever is completely intelligible to man.
Is this post getting too long? I lost track of time. If you did too, then Mission Accomplished.
5 comments:
I enjoy a good plagiaphrasing of Chesterton, and there is always room for more, because just when you think he's reached the peak of clarity, he provides another tasty morse which to imbibe as a means reach even higher.
For example, that we don’t know what a woman is, except she has a right to choose, except for female babies, who have no choice but to be aborted, for example, if the parents don't want a girl. Whatever that is.
See now, if only these leftists could go to the countries where they don't want daughters, they could helpfully explain that a daughter can be a perfectly good son. All they need to do is dress the child like a boy and raise her like a son. Problem solved!
That goes to another crazy absurdity: sexual "orientation" is fixed, while sex itself is whatever one wants it to be. If one is true the other is false.
Some intriguing arguments in this book called Knowledge and Evolution: How Theology, Philosophy, and Science Converge in the Question of Origins. Only up to p. 49, but much food for thought.
Appears it could be a very interesting read. In a similar vein, though not necessarily promoting a synthesis of faith and science, is Stephen C. Meyer's Return of the God Hypothesis, which I read earlier this year.
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