Intelligence is to Truth as freedom is to the Good. If this isn’t the case, then intelligence isn't intelligent and freedom isn’t free.
But I'm smart! Not like everybody says... like, dumb. If so, this is because there must be a higher principle above Fredo-dom, since
totality of intelligence implies freedom of will. This freedom would be meaningless without an end prefigured in the Absolute; without knowledge of God and our final ends, it [freedom] would be neither possible nor useful (Schuon).
Recall that “totality of intelligence” doesn't imply omniscience except at God’s end of the deal. As his intelligence is active and “convex,” so to speak, ours is in potential and “concave.”
This is what it means to be “conformed to the Absolute,” AKA the image and likeness mentioned at the end of yesterday’s post: the image is gratuitous, the likeness a work in progress; the former is a condition-without-which (necessary), the latter the condition-with-which (sufficient). Freedom is a kind of vertical link between man and God: it is what we work with, not an end as such.
Bottom line, man "can think truth or error, he can will good or evil, he can love beauty or ugliness” (Schuon). This is job one herebelow; or, in the words of the Aphorist, The soul is the task of man.
However, not only can this task not be accomplished without the divine accomplice, it seems self-evident to me that our conformity to these transcendentals is already divine assistance, and let Nicolás explain why this is so:
Truth:
All truths converge upon the one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.
Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about the truth.
The truth is objective but not impersonal.
Goodness:
It is needless to bless our goods. They are goods because God has blessed them.
Let us apply ourselves to reducing our deficits. The virtues are on God’s account.
We only love in our life presences that cross it like messengers from other worlds.
Beauty:
The work of art is a covenant with God.
Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.
Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.
Our duty always and everywhere is to aim at these vertical realities -- to realize them and make them real down here (in other words, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven):
There is something that man must know and think; and something that he must will and do; and something that he must love and be (Schuon).
In short, with great gifts -- gifts of intellect, freedom, and beauty -- come intrinsic duties, responsibilities, and obligations.
Nevertheless, the left will always be with us, since none of these possibilities can exist unless we are free to ignore them or choose badly. Whatever else “fallenness” is, it is a permanent possibility for man qua man.
In other words, if we are to have this possibility called man, then his vulnerability to a vertical plunge must be baked into the snake. It’s only logical, because if there is truth and freedom, then we must be free to reject truth -- to create ugliness and even "love hate," which gets to the essence of the diabolical left.
But what I really wanted to talk about this morning is Origins. While we can conceptualize the origin of anything, as soon as you think about it, it becomes quite mysterious.
To cite an obvious example, we can trace the origins of the cosmos to the Big Bang, but that’s not actually the origin of anything, rather, just the limit of our method or our paradigm, which goes only so far before everything goes dark. A horizon as not an origin, just a limit on what we can perceive.
It’s the same with all the really important things, including existence, life, consciousness, subjectivity, persons, and the transcendentals mentioned above. However, this post is probably too long already, so we’ll pick up this thread tomorrow. Call it the Origin of origins.
4 comments:
Z man:
"Gavin Newsom says his party is in trouble because they are 'getting crushed on narrative.” It is not the economy or culture; their problem is they have not presented a “compelling alternative narrative” to the Republicans."
That's the essence of the left: there's no truth or reality, just stories told by powerful leftists to seduce the powerless rubes.
I sometimes hear conservatives complain they don't have a good narrative either, and just tend to be reactionary to the left. Perhaps the only good narrative is a Christian one and that can't be propped up in political speak these days.
A narrative really goes to the whole subject of meaning, which is another important subject I want to discuss: exactly what is meaning? It's a kind of insight, but the problem with insights is that most of them are wrong.
One thing the left understands, and that is that humans need story as much as we need food or water. Possibly even moreso. Or rather, what we need is the Logos, but having rejected that any story will do so long as it is entertaining and explains things in a "good enough" manner. How else do we know who we are and what we should do, except through narrative? Of course, when the narrative is false, all hell breaks loose sooner or later, and here we are in clown world...
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